Michael Henderson suggests

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Climate Change as Market Failure

Friday, 30th November 2007

Sir Nicholas Stern is trotting out his old line again:

Climate change is a result of the greatest market failure the world has seen.

It rather upsets me that such an eminent economist peddles such tosh. This is not, in any way, evidence of a market failure. For it to be so we would have to identify the market which has failed. In which case, which market is it that has failed? The one for the externalties of fossil fuel consumption? The one for the externalities in changes in land use? The market for CO2 itself?

The point being that none of those markets actually exist at all, so they've not in fact either gone wrong nor have they failed. What we have here is the problem of the absence of a market. The solution to which is the construction of one.

Just as we've constructed markets in the past in real property, in food, in clothes, in fact, in almost everything.

This might seem a minor quibble but I assure you that it isn't. There are enough people out there suspicious of markets already without waving the word "failure" around. We'll never get them to understand the solution, the creation and construction of an effective and efficient market if we're telling them that it's the market that's failed in the first place.