October 3, 2020 — From early on in this pandemic, a common reaction has been “at least, maybe now we will get serious about addressing climate change.” One can see the logic. The terrible toll taken by Covid-19 should remind us of the importance of three things: the need for science, the role for public policy, and the usefulness of international cooperation. With these three revelations firmly in mind, we can see that we also need them to respond to the problem of climate change.
January 23, 2020 — Everyone agrees that Climate Change is at the top of the list of most important policy issues that we face – everyone, with a few exceptions such as Trump supporters who call it a hoax. Identifying the problem, however, is not much use unless we also identify the appropriate tools to address the problem.
Financial institutions
In my own field of specialization, central bankers have caught Climate Change fever. Perhaps the first was Governor Mark Carney — recently departed from the Bank of England. Christine Lagarde – newly arrived at the ECB from the International Monetary Fund — has declared the global environment to be “mission critical” for her institutions.
(April 15, 2016) President Barack Obama has had a remarkable series of foreign policy triumphs over the last 12 months. One of the lesser-known was the passage of legislation for reform of the IMF on December 18, 2015, after five years of obstruction by the US Congress.