         
I recently went to a talk by Nicholas Stern, author of The Stern Report, here in Oxford. In it he gave a brief overview of his report, but for those lacking an understanding of the economic terms and ideas it was quite hard to follow. However, he did say that climate change is the "greatest market failure ever seen". He was hopeful that corporate and individual responsibility could play a part in overcoming this, but wasn't forthcoming with ideas as to how we can correct this intrinsic failure in the market, but I guess that wasn't his remit. He gave an amusing commentary on the Blair/Brown leadership, saying he reported separately to them both. I also recently went to a talk on the concept of "Contraction and Convergence", a very simple, elegant solution to the problem of how to fairly cap and distribute carbon rations developed by the Global Commons Institute. The talk was great, and the idea is one that I feel can really change the market failure that Stern talked about into something that balances the interests of businesses and the environment in a global, open market. I'm planning to give the same talk to my College peers - hopefully it will convince them that it's possible to care for the environment and the economy at the same time. Tags: contraction & convergence, stern Blog post by ojwoodford on March 14, 2007 at 5:23 p.m.
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