In my podcast series, “Environmental Insights: Discussions on Policy and Practice from the Harvard Environmental Economics Program,” I was joined by ... my Harvard colleague – and good friend – Richard Zeckhauser, the Frank Ramsey Professor of Political Economy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association... Near the beginning of our conversation, Richard laments a phenomenon he terms “the pumped equilibrium,” in which people hold exaggerated expectations about confronting the challenge of climate change if we do not drastically increase our efforts. “People started at least three decades ago saying, ‘Climate change is a terrible problem, but we can control it by cutting back on our greenhouse gases, and this is the last decade that we can do that. If we don’t do it this decade, we’re dead.’ And then, the next decade they said … the same thing. And this decade they’re saying … the same thing. And they keep telling us that we’re going to be able to [limit the global temperature increase to] two degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels, or even more recently, 1.5 degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels. I think that’s unrealistic.” Richard maintains that instead a realistic assessment of the current state of climate change requires new approaches to make an impact. “The United States has done a so-so job of cutting our emissions by about 10 percent over a number of years, but at the same time, China has increased its emissions by 13 percent, and you can expect that countries like India will be growing much faster in its emissions [levels],” he remarks. “So, I think that we should take a sober look at these problems and say, ‘What else can we do?’” | 
