NYT Nails Stern Review

OK, The New York Times per se has not weighed in with harsh criticism, but Prof. Hal Varian of U. Cal. Berkeley, a contributor for the NYT's excellent "Economic Perspectives" column, weighs in today with a nice summary of the problematic assumptions made by Sir Nicholas Stern in the oft-quoted Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change.  For those who don't recall, Stern argued that it makes sense to spend 1 percent of the world's GDP to reduce greenhouse gas emissions because the costs associated with those emissions might total anywhere between 5-20% of global GDP some time down the road.

Regular readers here will notice that Prof. Varian's arguments closely mirror those I made earlier on this page (for the curious, here and here, with a minor correction to the latter here).

So it's not just me folks .....