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Artículo de referencia: El negacionismo económico, a propósito del pesimismo de The Economist en cambio climático

1. Slash emissions, fly by zeppelin – The Economist, 13/02/2012 – http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2012/02/climate-change-and-air-travel
   “The world has generally failed to agree on such cuts, and The Economist now believes «a dash to stay under 2°C [of average temperature increase] is no longer plausible.».”
2. The sad road from Kyoto to Durban – The Economist – Published online: 03/12/2011- http://www.economist.com/node/21541028
   “That is why many, including this newspaper, accept that a dash to stay under 2°C is no longer plausible. More deliberate action has more manageable costs.”
3. The Copenhagen Consensus – The Economist – Published online: 15/04/2004 – http://www.economist.com/node/2592716?story_id=2592716
   “The Copenhagen Consensus project, organised by Denmark’s Environmental Assessment Institute with the co-operation of The Economist, aims to consider and to establish priorities among a series of proposals for advancing global welfare.»
4. Doomsday postponed – The Economist, 06/09/2001 – http://www.economist.com/node/770765
   “This is one of the most valuable books in public policy – not merely on environmental policy – to have been written for the intelligent general reader in the past ten years … The Skeptical Environmentalist is a triumph.”
5. Clive L. Spash (2007) – The economics of climate change impacts a la Stern: novel and nuanced or rhetorically restricted? – Ecological Economics 63:706-713 doi:10.1016/j.ecolecon.2007.05.017 – Published online: 27/06/2007 – CSIRO, Sustainable Ecosystems Division – http://www.clivespash.org/ee2007_spashonstern.pdf
   “The basic issue is not the detail but the whole approach (Spash, 2007b). Economists finding themselves facing a complex and long-term problem recognise many of the key issues. Stern repeatedly tell us that there is considerable uncertainty over cause–effect relationships, that these will be outside empirical observation (Stern, 2006: 293 ft nt7), that their model relies upon “nonexistent data” (Stern, 2006: 153), and that ethics and social values are crucial to the decision. However they then squeeze all issues to fit within an existing theoretical model which is totally inadequate for addressing the problems they themselves have outlined.”
6. The heat is on – The Economist, 22/10/2011 – http://www.economist.com/node/21533360
   “At a time of exaggerated doubts about the instrumental temperature record, this should help promulgate its main conclusion: that the existing mean estimates are in the right ballpark. That means the world is warming fast.”
7. Fiona Harvey – The heat is on – Financial Times, 01/12/2008 – http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/429574ba-b9c4-11dd-99dc-0000779fd18c.html
   “Today’s financial crisis has been heralded as the worst since the 1930s … But even a severe recession would be small compared with what is likely to result from climate change if greenhouse gas emissions are left unchecked. Global warming has the power to plunge the world into a crisis deeper and more permanent than the Great Depression and two world wars of the last century.”
8. Ross Gelbspan (2005) – Boiling Point: How Politicians, Big Oil and Coal, Journalists and Activists Are Fueling the Climate Crisis And What We Can Do to Avert Disaster – Basic Books – ISBN-13: 978-0465027620 – 288 págs.
9. Max Hartwell (1995) – A History of the Mont Pélérin Society – Liberty Fund Inc. – ISBN-13: 978-0865971363 – 271 págs.
10. David Miller and William Dinan (2008) – A Century of Spin. How Public Relations Became the Cutting Edge of Corporate Power – Pluto Books, London – ISBN: 978-0-7453-2689-4 – 232 págs.
    “Friederich von Hayek … had been appointed at the LSE in 1931. He visited Paris in 1938 to participate in a five day colloquium in honour of Walter Lippmann … had ealier made … a ‘sweeping bow’ to Hayek in his book ‘The Good Society’ published in 1931 … ‘marked an intellectual turning point in the development in neoliberalism’ [John Bellamy Foster]. It also provided the initial stimulus for the creation, under the guidance of hayek, of the Mont Pélérin Society in 1947.”
11. Edward L. Bernays (1926, 1955) – Propaganda – Ig Publishing
    Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons … who pull the wires which control the public mind.”
12. Curtis A. Moore (2008) – Taking Control by Implementing the Manifiesto – http://www.saving-ourselves.com/pdf/Taking-Control.pdf
    “Much of the genius of the Powell Manifesto was its breadth. It left not a single stone unturned. It unleashed a flood of corporate money for the purpose of stripping away the products of democracy and, indeed, the suppressing democracy itself. The relationship between Americans and their governments has been altered, the rules by which we govern ourselves have been changed, the very mores of our society have been shifted, all because of a massive outpouring of money.”
13. Ross Gelbspan (1997) – The Heat is On: The climate crisis, the cover-up, the prescription – Perseus Books – ‘ISBN: 0-7382-0025-5 – 278 págs.
    “The financial resources available to the oil and coal lobbies are almost without limit. They can buy Congress. In fact, long before the climate issue surfaced, they already had. They can buy media access. Not just ads … but also access to editorial boards, TV producers, and every relevant reporter on the country.”
14. Ayn Rand – Wikipedia, 02/02/2012 – http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand
    “Rand defendía el egoísmo racional, el individualismo, y el capitalismo laissez faire, argumentando que es el único sistema económico que le permite al ser humano vivir como ser humano, es decir, haciendo uso de su facultad de razonar. En consecuencia, rechazaba absolutamente el socialismo, el altruismo y la religión.”
15. 350 Messengers – 350.org – 15/02/2012 – http://www.350.org/en/messengers
    “Bill McKibben; Rajendra Pachauri; Vandana Shiva; Abp. Desmond Tutu; Dr. James Hansen; Will Steger; Keibo Oiwa; Liz Thomson; Dr. James Hansen; Pres. Mohamed Nasheed; David Suzuki; Van Jones; Sheila Watt-Cloutier; Thomas Homer Dixon; Paul Loeb; Barbara Kingsolver; Alex Steffen; Lester Brown; George Monbiot; Colin Beaven; Ross Gelbspan.”
16. James Hansen et al (2008) – Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim? – The Open Atmospheric Science Journal 2:217-231 doi:10.2174/1874282300802010217 – Published online: 01/02/2008 – NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University Earth Institute – http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2008/2008_Hansen_etal.pdf – 10 authors
    “If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted … CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm … If the present overshoot of this target CO2 is not brief, there is a possibility of seeding irreversible catastrophic effects … This further 1.4 ºC warming still to come is due to the slow surface albedo feedback, specifically ice sheet disintegration and vegetation change.”
17. Patricia Cohen – Ivory Tower Unswayed by Crashing Economy – The New York Times, 04/03/2009 – http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/05/books/05deba.html
    “The former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan has admitted that he was shocked to discover a flaw in the free-market model and has even begun talking about temporarily nationalizing some banks … Unquestioning loyalty to a particular idea is what Robert J. Shiller, an economist at Yale University, Connecticut, says is the reason the profession failed to foresee the financial collapse. He blames ‘groupthink,’ the tendency to agree with the consensus.”
18. Mark Buchanan – This Economy Does Not Compute – The New York Times – Published online: 01/10/2008 – http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/01/opinion/01buchanan.html
    “This theory views markets as reflecting a balance of forces, and says that market values change only in response to new information — the sudden revelation of problems about a company, for example, or a real change in the housing supply. Markets are otherwise supposed to have no real internal dynamics of their own. Too bad for the theory, things don’t seem to work that way.”
19. Stefania Vitali et al (2011) – The network of global corporate control – arXiv:1107.5728v2 [q-fin.GN] – Published online: 19/09/2011 – Chair of Systems Design, ETH Zurich – http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1107/1107.5728v2.pdf
    “The fact that control is highly concentrated in the hands of few top holders does not determine if and how they are interconnected. It is only by combining topology with control ranking that we obtain a full characterization of the structure of control … Fig. 2 D shows a small subset of well-known financial players and their links, providing an idea of the level of entanglement of the entire core.”
20. Mathematics and Economics – En: Macmillan, The New Palgrave, a Dictionary of Economics – Published online: 01/01/2002 – http://econ.duke.edu/~erw/Preprints/Mathematics%20and%20Economics%20%28New%20Palgrave%29.pdf
    “That is, in the last third of the nineteenth century, in England as well as Italy, France, and Germany, a rigorous mathematical argument began to be seen as one based on a substrate of physical reasoning. For an argument to be rigorous, and thus believable, the mathematical structure had to be founded generally on the most successful of applied mathematical practices, namely rational mechanics.”
21. Jean-Philippe Bouchaud (2009) – Economics needs a scientific revolution – Nature 455:1181 doi:10.1038/4551181a – Published online: 30/10/2008 – Head of research of Capital Fund Management and a physics professor at École Polytechnique in France – http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue48/Bouchaud48.pdf
    “Reliance on models based on incorrect axioms has clear and large effects. The Black–Scholes model, for example, which was invented in 1973 to price options, is still used extensively. But it assumes that the probability of extreme price changes is negligible, when in reality, stock prices are much jerkier than this. Twenty years ago, unwarranted use of the model spiralled into the worldwide October 1987 crash; the Dow Jones index dropped 23% in a single day, dwarfing recent market hiccups. Ironically, it was the very use of a crash-free model that helped to trigger a crash.”
22. Lester Thurow (1984) – Dangerous Currents – MIT Sloan School of Management – Vintage – ISBN-13: 978-0394723686 – 259 págs. – http://dieoff.org/page162.htm “Contrary behavioral evidence has had little impact on economics because having a theory of how the world «ought» to act, economists can reject all manner of evidence showing that individuals are not rational utility maximizers. Actions that are not rational maximizations exist, but they are labeled «market imperfections» that «ought» to be eliminated. Individual economic actors «ought» to be rational utility maximizers and they can be taught to do what they «ought» to do. Prescription dominates description in economics, while the reverse is true in the other social sciences that study real human behavior.»
23. Cutler J Cleveland and Matthias Ruth (1997) – When, where, and by how much do biophysical limits constrain the economic process?: A survey of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen’s contribution to ecological economics – Ecological Economics 22:203-223 doi:10.1016/S0921-8009(97)00079-7 – Published online: 24/07/1998 – Department of Geography and Center for Energy and Environmental Studies, Boston University – http://www.publicpolicy.umd.edu/files.php/faculty/ruth/biophysical_limits.pdf
    “The classical economic model fares no better under the light of physical realities. Perrings (1986) develops a variant of the von Neumann- Leontief-Sraffa neo-Ricardian general equilibrium model in the context of a jointly determined economy- environment system subject to a conservation of mass constraint. The model demonstrates that the conservation of mass contradicts the free disposal, free gifts, and non-innovation assumptions of such models. Accounting for the conservation of mass destroys the determinacy of the closed, time variant system in the classical model. An expanding economy causes continuous disequilibrating change in the environment. Since market prices in an interdependent economy-environment system often do not accurately reflect environmental change, such transformations of the environment often will go unanticipated.”
24. Climate change in black and white – The Economist, 17/02/2011 – http://www.economist.com/node/18175423
    “The technical, environmental, political and moral pros and cons of such ‘geoengineering’ have been widely discussed since. The idea gained a lot of credibility from the fact that although Dr Crutzen is one of the people who first warned of man-made damage to the stratosphere’s ozone layer—work which won him a Nobel prize—he is not overly worried that added sulphates would add significantly to the damage. But little of the discussion has focused on one of the two key ideas on which Dr Crutzen’s argument was built: that geoengineering could solve the problem of pollution-control measures that save people but warm the planet.”
25. Saving the system – The Economist, 09/10/2008 – http://www.economist.com/node/12381429
    “Even in the best of circumstances, the consequences of the biggest asset and credit bubble in history will linger. But if the panic is stemmed, it could be a manageable problem, cushioned by the economic strength in the emerging world. Efforts at international economic co-operation have a patchy record. In the 1980s the Plaza and Louvre accords, designed respectively to push the dollar down and to prop it up, met with mixed success. Today’s problems are deeper and more countries are involved. But the stakes are also much higher.”

Artículo de referencia: El negacionismo económico, a propósito del pesimismo de The Economist en cambio climático