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Avoiding extinction: 21st century economics

Published on March 30, 2022   30 min

A selection of talks on Technology & Operations

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0:00
My name is Graciela Chichilnisky, I am a professor of Economics and Mathematics at Columbia University, and a visiting professor at Stanford University. I'm going to talk about Avoiding Extinction: 21st Century Economics. The topic of this presentation, Avoiding Extinction: 21st Century Economics, is new thinking about the economic challenges we face in the implementation and design of programs that can stabilize the climate.
0:40
The first observation that should be relatively easy to agree on is that we're living in a world that is dominated by human beings, a human dominated world. But what's interesting is that humans are the largest geological force in the planet because we are changing the planet's atmosphere, its body of waters, and the complex web of species that makes life on Earth. This leads us to the orange point in the bottom of this slide, which is the crucial issue of climate change.
1:14
This leads to global risks that we are facing, as we said, one is potentially catastrophic climate change. The other one is, equally potentially catastrophic, biodiversity extinction, as well as the scarcity of clean water on the planet, and the fact that life in the oceans is going extinct. The word extinct there has a particular significance, and ties with the title of this presentation about avoiding extinction.

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