Martin Weitzman Remembered
The leading environmental economist died last year at age 77
When I look at the obituary pages, the first thing I see are the faces. I draw a dead person everyday. It’s a practice.
Not everyone gets mentioned in the newspaper when they expire, and even those who do are not always inspiring. Martin Weitzman’s name didn’t register, but his image resonated in ways that I can’t articulate — which is why I drew him. It was the weak smile, the sad eyes and those interlocked hands thrust out of the bottom frame of the picture. Who was this guy?
Weitzman was an economist and he used his knowledge of numbers and markets to address the climate crisis. His research showed that there was a slim but significant chance of economic collapse if governments didn’t address climate change.
According to his obituary in The New York Times on Sept. 4, 2019,
Most economists have relied on a cost-benefit analysis when considering how ambitiously governments might try to reduce heat-trapping carbon emissions, either by imposing caps on how much can be emitted or by taxing the polluters.
But Professor Weitzman demonstrated that such prevailing cost-benefit analyses understated the small but nevertheless credible risks that worst-case environmental damage posed to the world and its economy, from its agricultural production to its delivery of goods and services. Were governments to take these catastrophic scenarios into account more seriously, he said, they would be more vigorous in their efforts to slow or even reverse global warming.
What if Chicken Little was right? Folktales are stealth lessons, after all.
The sky is falling, and Weitzman used the language of science to try and show policymakers that while our planet was presently habitable, the odds were against us if don’t change our ways.
That’s no folk tale.
In 2015, Weitzman with coauthor and New York University economist Gernot Wagner, published Climate Shock: The Economic Consequences of a Hotter Planet. They wrote, “One thing we know for sure is that a greater than 10 percent chance of the earth’s eventual warming of 11 degrees Fahrenheit or more — the end of the human adventure on this planet as we now know it — is too high. And that’s the path the planet is on at the moment.”
Here’s the kicker: “Most everything we know tells us climate change is bad. Most everything we don’t know tells us it’s probably much worse.”
His analysis was called the Dismal Theorem.
Weitzman committed suicide on Aug. 27, 2019.
In 2018, Weitzman was nominated for a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, but when it was awarded to two economists, including Yale professor William D. Nordhaus, who was known for his own work in environmental economics, Weitzman became depressed.
He left a note saying his facilities were diminishing and the difficult problems he worked on were slipping beyond his capacity to solve them.
King Kong, a more modern folk tale, ends with the line, “It was beauty that killed the beast.” For Weitzman, maybe it was the beauty of numbers and solving problems that kept him alive. Without that life wasn’t worth living.
He could have just waited a few years and Weitzman would see that nature was coming to put him out of his misery. With his voice silenced I fear the odds are looking good that we’ll be joining him soon enough.
