Like Al Gore, Nicholas Stern is a “rock star of global warming”.
His new book, A Blueprint for a Safer Planet, is required
reading for this year’s climate talks, writes Fiona Harvey. A
Blueprint for a Safer Planet Bodley Head, 2009 Climate change
is, Nicholas Stern argues, the biggest example of market failure
we will ever see. If you thought government bail-outs were
giving financiers an easy way out, look at the free ride we have
been given over our climate-killing consumption patterns. “When
we emit greenhouse gases, we damage the prospects for others
and, unless appropriate policy is in place, we do not bear the
costs of the damage,” Stern writes in his new book, A Blueprint
for a Safer Planet. “Markets then fail in the sense that their
main coordinating mechanism -- prices -- give the wrong
signals.” In a free market, no one gets charged for producing
carbon. The resulting costs -- catastrophic changes to the
earth’s climate -- are felt too late for the market to correct
the error. Carbon dioxide has a d