US ‘green growth’ duo win Economics Nobel

US economists William Nordhaus and Paul Romer yesterday shared the 2018 Nobel Economics Prize for constructing “green growth” models that show how innovation and climate policies can be integrated with economic growth. Working independently, they have addressed “some of our time’s most basic and pressing questions about how we create long-term sustained and sustainable growth,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in a statement. Nordhaus is a professor at Yale University. Romer is a former World Bank chief economist now at New York University’s Stern School of Business.

The academy said their models, both developed in the 1990s, have “significantly broadened the scope of economic analysis”. The prize announcement came as the UN warned in a landmark report that an “unprecedented” transformation of society and the world economy was needed to avoid global climate chaos. It said time was running out to avert disaster, noting that our plant’s surface has already warmed one degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit).

Romer told the Swedish academy in a live phone interview at the prize announcement that he was confident the world could reduce greenhouse gas emissions and still improve standards of living in the future. “We can absolutely make substantial progress to protecting the environment, and without giving up the chance for sustained growth,” he said.

“One of the problems with the current situation is that many people think that dealing with protecting the environment will be so costly and so hard that they will ignore the problem and deny it exists,” he said. “I hope the prize will help people see humans are capable of amazing accomplishments when we try to do something.”