Climate change is no longer a scientific curiosity; it is a fundamental theme of today’s public debate. A significant step was the 2006 Stern Report, 5 which followed a series of important international agreements (chief among them the Kyoto Treaty of 1997) and thoroughgoing albeit undervalued studies by the World Bank and the OECD.
Some of its assumptions were criticised, such as the discount rate it used to estimate economic costs, which was very low and thus – like The Limits to Growth – likely to neglect potential mitigating and feedback effects, such as those connected with technical progress.