ABSTRACT
With the publication of the Stern Report in 2006, we entered stirring times for sustainability. Any set of policy recommendations which manages to unite Shell UK, the TUC, Friends of the Earth and the Treasury in its favour must have a very great deal going for it. And indeed, there does seem to have been a sudden surge of interest in and concern about these issues – at least as far as they are represented by the need to mitigate or adapt to climate change. Probably now for the first time, there is the chance of real public recognition of global warming as an urgent problem, and of hard-nosed political work to address it. It helps, of course, that it is a Treasury economist who is now recommending action, rather than the merely academic and ‘green’ economists who have been recommending it for about two decades. The Report’s establishment pedigree, in fact, will surely give a major impetus to what has now become the standard prescription on climate change.
