Gernot Wagner

Gernot Wagner
Gernot Wagner in January 2021
Born	1980 Austria
Nationality	Austrian & American
Spouse	Dr. Siripanth Nippita (m. 2002)[1]
Academic career
Field	climate economics
Institution	Columbia Business School
School or tradition	environmental economics
Alma mater	Harvard University Stanford University
Doctoral advisor	Robert N. Stavins
Influences	Nat Keohane Martin Weitzman Richard Zeckhauser
Awards	Top 15 Financial Times-McKinsey Business Book of the Year 2015; Austrian of the Year 2022
Information at IDEAS / RePEc

Gernot Wagner (1980 in Austria) is an Austro-American climate economist at Columbia Business School, where he is a tenured full professor.[2][3] He holds an AB and a PhD in political economy and government from Harvard University, as well as an MA in economics from Stanford University. A founding co-director of Harvard's Solar Geoengineering Research Program (2017-2019) [4] he joined the faculty of New York University in 2019, moving to Columbia University in 2022.[5][6] Wagner writes a monthly column for Project Syndicate, and is the co-author, with Martin L. Weitzman, of Climate Shock,[7] a Top 15 Financial Times-McKinsey Business Book of the Year 2015.[8] He won the "Austrian of the Year" award in 2022, awarded by Austrian daily Die Presse.[9]

Climate and energy policy

Wagner was an economist at the Environmental Defense Fund from 2008 to 2014 and lead senior economist from 2014 to 2016.[7][10] While there he was a member of the faculty of the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University, and he wrote Climate Shock (2015), a book emphasizing the importance of risk and uncertainty for prompting action on climate change.[11][12][13] Wagner was a member of the six-person lead author team, including Suzi Kerr, that wrote the World Bank's Emissions Trading in Practice : A Handbook on Design and Implementation.[14]

"Risk" and "uncertainty" in climate change are often mentioned as reasons to delay action. Wagner's Climate Shock, joint with Martin Weitzman, emphasizes that the "known unknowns" and potential "unknown unknowns" instead increase the need for action.[7] This contrasts with work done, for example, by economists Bill Nordhaus, Richard Tol, and others. Nordhaus, in turn, favorably reviewed Wagner and Weitzman's book in the New York Review of Books.[15] Wagner's latest academic work on this topic, joint with Kent Daniel of Columbia University and Bob Litterman of Kepos Capital further emphasizes the importance of pricing climate risk and uncertainty.[16]

Geoengineering

Wagner was the founding co-director, joint with David Keith, of Harvard's Solar Geoengineering Research Program founded in 2017 as an interfaculty research initiative.[4][17] His geoengineering research focuses on economics, governance, policy, and public perception, including the chemtrails conspiracy theory.[18] Together with Dustin Tingley, Wagner finds that in a U.S. public opinion survey conducted in October 2016, 30 to 40% of the U.S. public believed in a version of the conspiracy.[19] The paper also describes what the authors call a "community of conspiracy" in online discourse, in particular on Twitter and other anonymous social media.

On November 23, 2018, Wagner published an open-access article on "Stratospheric aerosol injection tactics and costs in the first 15 years of deployment."[20][21] The article was noticed by CNN, where the journalist said: "Scientists are proposing an ingenious but as-yet-unproven way to tackle climate change: spraying sun-dimming chemicals into the Earth's atmosphere."[22] The proposal "estimated the development costs of a stratospheric fleet of sulfur-releasing aircraft at $3.5 billion. This theoretical program would start in 2033 with two aircraft and 4,000 annual flights, increasing over 15 years to nearly 100 aircraft flying hundreds of flights a week," and would cost annually to operate "roughly $2.25 billion".[23]

Books

Gernot Wagner has written five books:

• 2003: Der Rest der Welt. Ein Reiseführer für überzeugte Daheimbleiber, Wien, Ueberreuter-Verlag 2003, ISBN 3-8000-3957-5
• 2011: But Will The Planet Notice?. New York, Hill & Wang/Farrar Straus & Giroux, ISBN 0-8090-5207-5
• 2015: Climate Shock, joint with Martin Weitzman, Princeton University Press 2015, ISBN 978-0-691-15947-8 (Financial Times-McKinsey Top 15 Business Book of the Year 2015. Translated into several languages, including German, which has been awarded Austria's Natural Science Book of the Year 2017.)
• 2021: Stadt, Land, Klima: Warum wir nur mit einem urbanen Leben die Erde retten, Brandstätter 2021, ISBN 978-3-7106-0508-6. [German: "City Country Climate"]
• 2021: Geoengineering: The Gamble, Wiley 2021, ISBN 1509543058[24]

Personal Life

Wagner has been married since 2002 to Dr. Siri Nippita, a gynecologist at NYU Langone Medical Center and the chief of the family planning division as well as the director of Reproductive Choice at Bellevue Hospital.[1][25] They have two young children and live in New York City.[26][27]

See also

• New Yorkers in journalism
• Environmental economics
• Climateflation
• Fossilflation

References

1. Steinhardt, Jenifer (5 June 2002). "Love Stories: International Affairs". The Harvard Crimson. Retrieved 1 February 2018.
2. "Gernot Wagner - Project Syndicate". www.project-syndicate.org. Retrieved October 12, 2022.
3. Gaulhofer, Karl (28 August 2017). "Für Pessimismus ist es zu spät" (in German). No. Alpbach. Die Presse. Retrieved 19 December 2017.
4. Ramachandran, Akshitha (17 April 2017). "Harvard Researchers Launch Solar Geoengineering Moonshot". www.thecrimson.com. The Harvard Crimson. Retrieved 19 December 2017.
5. Cohen, Joyce (September 5, 2019). "They Wanted a Downtown Loft With Few Walls. Which One Would You Choose?". The New York Times. Retrieved 3 July 2021.
6. "Gernot Wagner Columbia Business School profile". gsb.columbia.edu. Retrieved 12 October 2022.
7. Lieberman, Bruce (2 November 2016). "Geoengineering: crazy...with a big 'but' » Yale Climate Connections". Yale Climate Connections. Retrieved 5 February 2018.
8. "Gernot Wagner | Harvard Kennedy School". www.hks.harvard.edu.
9. Marits, 21 10 2022 um 09:55 von Mirjam (2022-10-21). ""Das ist erst der allererste Anfang"". Die Presse (in German). Retrieved 2023-05-10.
10. Meyer, Robinson (29 June 2017). "The American South Will Bear the Worst of Climate Change's Costs". The Atlantic.
11. Heal, Geoffrey (2017). "The Economics of the Climate". Journal of Economic Literature. 55 (3): 1046–1063. doi:10.1257/jel.20151335. ISSN 0022-0515.
12. Chait, Jonathan. "What If Climate Scientists Are Guessing Wrong?". Daily Intelligencer. Retrieved 2017-12-19.
13. Clark, Pilita (29 March 2015). "'Climate Shock: The Economic Consequences of a Hotter Planet', by Gernot Wagner and Martin Weitzman". Financial Times.
14. Partnership for Market Readiness; International Carbon Action Partnership (2016). Emissions Trading in Practice. Washington, DC: World Bank. doi:10.1596/23874.
15. Nordhaus, William D. (4 June 2015). "A New Solution: The Climate Club". The New York Review of Books.
16. "The High Cost of Climate Uncertainty". Ideas & Insights. Columbia Business School. 3 February 2015. Retrieved 20 December 2017.
17. Meyer, Robinson (25 January 2018). "What Happens If We Start Solar Geo-Engineering—and Then Suddenly Stop?". The Atlantic. Retrieved 5 February 2018.
18. Beaumont, Hilary (22 November 2017). "Chemtrails conspiracy theorists are sending death threats to climate scientists". VICE News.
19. Tingley, Dustin; Wagner, Gernot (31 October 2017). "Solar geoengineering and the chemtrails conspiracy on social media". Palgrave Communications. 3. doi:10.1057/s41599-017-0014-3. ISSN 2055-1045.
20. Smith, Wake; Wagner, Gernot (2018). "Stratospheric aerosol injection tactics and costs in the first 15 years of deployment". Environmental Research Letters. 13 (12): 124001. Bibcode:2018ERL....13l4001S. doi:10.1088/1748-9326/aae98d. ISSN 1748-9326.
21. Carrington, Damian (23 November 2018). "Solar geoengineering could be 'remarkably inexpensive' – report". the Guardian.
22. Robinson, Matthew (23 November 2018). "Dimming the sun: The answer to global warming?". CNN.
23. Montlake, Simon (23 January 2020). "Should we fiddle with Earth's thermostat? This man might know how". The Christian Science Monitor.
24. Wagner, Gernot (2021). Geoengineering : the gamble. Cambridge, UK. ISBN 978-1-5095-4305-2. OCLC 1230230935.
25. Postl, Elisabeth (22 August 2017). "Kulturkampf um den Kreißsaal" (in German). No. Alpbach. Die Presse. Retrieved 1 February 2018.
26. Cohen, Joyce (5 September 2019). "They Wanted a Downtown Loft With Few Walls. Which One Would You Choose?". The New York Times.
27. Greenberg, Paul; Wagner, Gernot (2023-02-07). "Opinion | Our City Could Become One of the World's Greenest, but It Won't Be Easy". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2023-03-05.

External links

• Professional homepage