William Nordhaus Has Died. Nobelist Influenced Climate Policy.

William D.Nordhaus, a Yale economist and Nobel laureate who tabulated the economic wreckage of carbon emissions and influenced climate policy across several presidential administrations, died on Friday at his home in New Haven.

He was 85.The cause was glioblastoma, a form of brain cancer, said his nephew Ted Nordhaus.In 2018, Professor Nordhaus shared the Nobel in economic science with Paul M.Romer, an economist at New York University.

The Nobel committee cited Professor Nordhaus’s work in developing a method to balance climate change’s long-term damage with the costs required to contain it.The model, which Professor Nordhaus refined over decades, has underpinned dozens of regulations around the world aimed at limiting fossil fuels and seeded the ground for a new field of research that bridges the gap between economics and earth science.“He played a crucial role in terms of bringing consideration of the natural environment into the mainstream of economics, whereas earlier, it was sort of a fringe area,” said Robert Stavins, director of the environmental economics program at Harvard, who wrote about Professor Nordhaus’s impact.Professor Nordhaus saw climate change as a clear threat to humankind, but he emphasized that potential damages must be balanced with the economic cost of preventing them.“Climate stabilization would appear enormously expensive,” he concluded, in his initial paper describing the model.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe....