Gernot Wagner breaks down the economics of climate collapse & the cultural barriers to change

Gernot Wagner is a climate economist at Columbia Business School. His research, writing, and teaching focus on climate risks and climate policy. Gernot writes a monthly column for Project Syndicate and has written several books, including: Geoengineering: the Gamble, But will the planet notice?, Climate Shock, which he co-authored with Martin Weitzman, and City, Country, Climate published in German. Since he’s well-versed in environmental science, public policy, and economics, I wanted to ask him some questions about the nature of the capitalist system we inhabit as a global order, and also some of the ways that system is reinforced, both through government policy and through social norms. While he readily concedes the fact that the system of neoliberal capitalism is fundamentally a flawed one, replete with problems, he makes it clear that he feels the fix for our situation is to work within it. The sense I get is that, from Wagner’s perspective, we have to hope it is possible to reform capitalism in part because the version of it we live in now is completely unregulated, it’s a space where, despite the obviousness of the truth of climate collapse, the average car now “looks like a tank.” It’s an iteration of capitalist overproduction in which “we are just letting things rip and not caring” about the consequences. I like his idea that the current state of affairs means that societies have, to some extent, made “a fetish out of” the market as a sensible source of social organization, when it is clearly not. But, to put it differently, the point is that another capitalism is possible. For this reason, Gernot says he really disagrees with folks like Naomi Klein, who say that right now, our moment of peril and precarity, is our “last best chance” to replace capitalism. He agrees that the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the global instability it has caused really did represent a “window of opportunity” for climate and energy policy, but we talk about how it has mainly led to a shift in defense spending, a widespread militarization which, incidentally, is going to worsen the climate crisis. I got so much out of talking with Gernot. He argues really clearly for attacking the problem of climate change by centring human desires, and more particularly social norms. He stresses that, given the overwhelming mess we are in, we are going to flip the switch not just by making rational arguments, but by combining the work of pushing for policy change with the perhaps more complicated work of rewriting the norms and cultural defaults that make ecocidal behaviour seem acceptable. As an economist, but also as an observer of the built environment, he’s really perceptive about the way that social norms function as a major determinant of climate action, to a greater extent than the level of knowledge we have.