But Will the Planet Notice?

You are one of seven billion people on Earth. Put bluntly whatever you do personally eat tofu in a Hummer or hamburgers in a Prius the planet doesn''t care. Nor for that matter does the economy. And when confronting the entwined challenges of climate change species preservation and a planet going off the cliff it is what several billion people do that makes a difference. The solution? Not scientists not politicians not activists. Cue the economists. The hope of mankind and indeed of every living thing on the planet is now in the hands of the masters of the dismal science. Fortunately they''ve been there before albeit on a much smaller scale. It was economists who solved acid rain in the 1990s admittedly with a strong assist from a phalanx of lawyers and activists. Economists have helped get lead out of our gas and they can explain why lobsters haven''t disappeared off the coast of New England but tuna is on the verge of extinction. More disquietingly they can take the lessons of the financial crisis and model with greater accuracy than anyone else the likelihood of environmental catastrophe and they can rationalize the abandonment of threatened species. They can also solve the climate crisis if only we let them.