There is an unpleasant and unnecessary fight going on at the moment between Dave Roberts of Grist and the environmental economists of Common Tragedies and Environmental Economics (bunch of links here). It’s basically a rehashing of a debate that reoccurs every now and then in which environmentalists get upset at the economists for seeming too detached or sanguine or market oriented and the economists respond testily that air-headed greens are ignoring the invaluable advice economists have to offer and hurting their own cause.

This exchange in particular has been very disappointing. Tim Haab essentially calls Roberts an idiot, which is absurd; Roberts is very smart on these issues and has a very sophisticated, and for the most part correct (in my view), outlook on carbon pricing. Meanwhile, economists should remember that for every nutty green out there who thinks we really need to get going with the urban farming there are empty-headed economists who are unwilling to admit that climate change is worth any policy changes.

Anyway, my view here is that the economic analytical approach is basically the right one and is indispensible, but that economists generally have far too much confidence in the actual prescriptions their models spit out. There is a large and scary cloud of uncertainty surrounding our predictions, in other words, which justifies, in my opinion, a little fudge room on the policy side. So let’s get the prices right(ish) by all means, but let’s also not fret too much about government subsidies for research and for promising technologies and deployment of those technologies.

And really, when one of the nation’s top newspapers is more than happy to print George Will’s climate denialism, it seems to me that there are better ways for environmentalists and economists whose positions are actually quite close to spend their time than having these little tiffs.