Global warming now has a book all its own, and while it may not hit the bestseller lists, "The Oxford Handbook of the Macroeconomics of Global Warming" will at least give people pause for thought.
The book, edited by Oxford academics Lucas Bernard, a business professor, and Willi Semmler, a professor of economics, explores the consequences the world economy faces from the effects of global warming.
Among the issues dealt with in the 720-page tome are the economic implications of preventative measures being considered globally along with adaptation efforts and policy changes, and the different kinds of consequences that climate change might have on developed and developing nations.
A multiple-disciplinary approach has brought together world-class experts contributing sections of issues concerning growth, development and employment as they are impacted by the complex and encompassing effects of global warming.
The book, from the Oxford University Press, will be released Nov. 26 and can be preordered online.
The book contains six parts.
- Growth and Climate Change
- Mitigation Policy Modeling
- Technology and Energy Policies
- Economic Effects of Mitigation and Adaptation
- International Perspectives
- Directions in Mitigation Policy Design
Its publication comes as countries around the world begin to consider the economic toll climate change and global warming are taking on their economies.
In the United States, the costs of paying for the disruptions caused by climate change was the largest category of non-defense discretionary items in the 2012 budget, the Natural Resources Defense Council said in a release.
In that year, the federal government spent more taxpayer money on the consequences of extreme weather than on education or transportation, the group said.
Climate-related droughts, hurricanes, super storms, blizzards, heat wild fires and heat waves in the United States in 2012 caused an estimated $139 billion in damages, it said.
Those costs represented almost 1 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product; this "climate disruption tax," as the NRDC characterizes it, was equal to half the total sales tax collected by all U.S. states in 2012.
That's the sort of economic impact the authors of The Oxford Handbook of the Macroeconomics of Global Warming area addressing.
Those concerned with climate change have lauded the Oxford work and its calls to action.
"Governments can and must regulate cooperatively," says Edgar Bronfman, Jr., Executive Chairman of carbon capture firm Global Thermostat.
"Private industry can and must address the causal factors, and the solutions to mitigate, global warming. In this seminal work, Bernard and Semmler give us an insightful and comprehensive framework to find the social, scientific, and economic initiatives critical to solving humankind's greatest challenge," he says.
