Can we afford the future?

Earlier this year, Frank Ackerman published a fabulous little book, Can we afford the future? The economics of a warming world, that is notable for a whole lot more than its extensive, and extremely favorable, treatment of the Greenhouse Development Rights approach.

More precisely, Can we afford the future? contains an useful little discussion of equity in the context of the search for a viable global climate accord, and it is of course in this regard that it introduces GDRs.   What it really is, however, is a short and startlingly helpful primer on the problem of neoclassical economics, and of the system that has thrown up neoclassical economics as one of its principle justifications.

After reading this book, if you want more, see Priceless: On Knowing the Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing, also by Ackerman and his co-author  Lisa Heinzerling.   The subtitle says it all.