Environmental Economics

Innovation is magical thinking, if not a weasel word
I fully agree that an economist can’t make a geoforecast of any duration, but likewise economists may be a bit presumptuous making forecasts about the rate of technological innovation without being familiar with the particular system or field that that is assumed will carry it out—mostly engineering. I don’t know much about Krugman, but I did read Shumpeter’s book and I doubt that he would agree with the gist of the “creative destruction of climate economics.” Schumpeter argued that since capitalism is a process, it is unsuitable as an end in itself. Does the reasoning behind his argument not hold with the process of technological innovation?
The Environment and Directed Technical Change, says The Economist, “looks at things like patent citations to show that there is an inertia to innovation.” Inertia to innovation? Holy smoke! We now presume to know what the pace of innovation should be and consider it quantifiable and homogenous over time and across the various realms of physics, disciplines, and practical limits, making investment a reliable antecedent to creating the particular intended outcome of our choosing. Forecasting any nonlinear, emergent, episodic process using linear models can only be done in the absence of a tipping point that destroys one of its many necessary assumptions.
Perhaps the reason why something so huge is easy to Krugman is that the hard (or impossible) part is establishing the pricing—after that there’s no work at all. There is nothing wrong with investing in clean energy, but in my humble opinion, internalizing costs of fossil fuels is justified in its own right. What establishes this right? First, while the market can be manipulated or disregarded much of the time, market forces are self-perpetuating and it is relentless, even as we sleep. It will eventually seek equilibrium, often in an unfortunate way when we consistently reason away or ignore external cost and consequences. Second, it is unethical to impose transaction costs to those who have nothing to do with the market activity, including those in the future. That is completely contrary of the American legacy of leaving a better world to each successive generation.