Cam Fortems – Kamloops This Week
In Jason Shogren’s home state of Wyoming, the favourite mode of transport is the gas-guzzling pickup.
In Scandinavia, where Shogren lived for a time as an expert advisor to King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden, residents willingly pay high taxes and $2.30 a litre for gasoline in an effort to stop climate change.
Those efforts come despite the fact Northern Europe’s sacrifice will have no affect if done alone.
“Even Norway, with so many fossil fuels, has been extremely aggressive, whereas the United States and part of Alberta in the oil industry are less aggressive,” said the professor of natural resources and economics, who also advised U.S. president Bill Clinton.
“I don’t know how to explain that.”
Shogren is now back home, where he is a professor at the University of Wyoming.
He was also a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former U.S. vice-president Al Gore.
Shogren was a guest at Thompson Rivers University last week, where he spoke on the cost of climate change.
In an interview with KTW, Shogren said decision-makers in business and government have to decide how to price the cost of climate change, whether in changed food production, natural catastrophes or spread of disease.
The cost of doing nothing “is the cost of increased risk, he said.
“The big one is agricultural production,” Shogren said.
“If we’re really worried about food production and don’t know whether places will get wetter or drier or warmer or windier, it causes more uncertainty, which could impact our ability to produce food.”
At the extreme end of the scale is what he calls the cost of “unravelling our web of biodiversity” and spread of tropical disease and pests into northern climates.
That risk will be a greater burden on world’s poor in the future.
“We got rich using carbon. Are we going to going to transfer that wealth to folks in the future?” Shogren asked.
“You don’t write them a cheque. You start by curbing your GDP today, transforming from fossil fuels to renewable energy. That means up-front costs today.”
He argued in favour of this province adopting a carbon tax, something he said most economists would favour as a way of pricing pollution.
The economist said he is not an evangelist preaching doom on climate change.
Rather, he is interested in pricing climate change, ways to slow it and ways to adapt, noting that information can be used by business and government.