The world needs high-quality data like that collected for employment or inflation to guide governments in their response, says Mihir Sharma for Bloomberg Opinion.
File photo. A family cools themself in a park using irrigation water pipe as northern Indian reels under intense heat wave in Uttar Pradesh on Apr 19, 2023. - above 40 degrees Celsius even at night - that people are gasping, the tap water is scalding, and the walls of their homes emit heat like radiators.And yet economists - clearly able to keep cool heads when everybody else is losing theirs - are in the middle of a fresh debate about the real costs of climate change .
They point out that this makes unilateral climate action worth it for countries like the US; that argument must surely also hold countries that are poorer but far more exposed to climate change, such as India. Possible to add a couple more countries here? Billions of taxpayer dollars are being directed to sectors that promise to curb emissions. Consumers are paying more for carbon-intensive goods and services, and pressure to follow a net zero strategy has complicated decisions for companies and institutional investors.
It isn’t just various Republican politicians attacking “woke capital” to get in the headlines. Serious macroeconomic decision-makers, accustomed to evidence-based policy, are beginning to ask exactly what global warming’s costs and benefits are for their particular countries.India’s chief economic adviser, for example, asked earlier this year if we were irrationally scared of the health effects of global warming.
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