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Juan Moreno-CruzThe article for Slate featured perspective by Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts economics professor Juan Moreno-Cruz.
"With just two or three days remaining of official negotiations, the end game has arrived in the Paris climate talks… A trio of new reports released this week show that whatever happens in Paris, families and countries at the front lines of climate change will likely have their work cut out for them—and together they provide even greater urgency to the negotiations in Paris. In the first report, a group of climate scientists and economists warns that the impacts of climate change could come more quickly and more harshly than predicted, which eventually will remove some incentives to cut emissions. That’s because, once damages from effects like rising sea level reach a “saturation” point—a low-lying country like the Maldives going underwater, for example—vulnerable countries will no longer have reason to argue for restrictions on greenhouse gases because they’ll have nothing left to lose. "We have a relatively small window of opportunity in terms of economic incentives underlying the climate science," said Juan Moreno-Cruz, an economist at Georgia Tech and a co-author of the report, in a press release. "Once we pass a certain threshold, we won't be able to go back because we will lose the incentives to do so.”"
