Climate Change, Climate Policy, and Economic Growth

July 1, 2019, Paper, "The topics of climate change and climate change policy encompass a complex mixture of the natural sciences, economics, and a mass of institutional, legal, and technical details. This complexity and multidisciplinary nature make it difficult for thoughtful citizens to reach their own conclusions on the topic and for potentially interested economists to know where to start. This essay aims to provide a point of entry for macroeconomists interested in climate change and climate change policy but with no special knowledge of the field. I therefore start at the beginning, with some basic background on climate change, presented through the eyes of an econometrician. I then turn to climate policy in the United States. That discussion points to a large number of researchable open questions which macroeconomists are particularly well-suited to tackle."