Gernot Wagner (1980 in Austria) is an Austro-American climate economist at Columbia Business School.
Climate and energy policy
Wagner was an economist at the Environmental Defense Fund from 2008 to 2014 and lead senior economist from 2014 to 2016.
While there he was a member of the faculty of the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University, and he wrote
Climate Shock (2015), a book emphasizing the importance of risk and uncertainty for prompting action on climate change.
Wagner was a member of the six-person lead author team, including
Suzi Kerr, that wrote the
World Bank's
Emissions Trading in Practice : A Handbook on Design and Implementation.
"Risk" and "uncertainty" in climate change are often mentioned as reasons to delay action. Wagner's Climate Shock, joint with Martin Weitzman, emphasizes that the "known unknowns" and potential "unknown unknowns" instead increase the need for action.
Geoengineering
Wagner was the founding co-director, joint with David Keith, of Harvard's Solar Geoengineering Research Program founded in 2017 as an interfaculty research initiative.
His geoengineering research focuses on economics, governance, policy, and public perception, including the chemtrails conspiracy theory.
Together with Dustin Tingley, Wagner finds that in a U.S. public opinion survey conducted in October 2016, 30 to 40% of the U.S. public believed in a version of the conspiracy.
The paper also describes what the authors call a "community of conspiracy" in online discourse, in particular on Twitter and other anonymous social media.
On November 23, 2018, Wagner published an open-access article on "Stratospheric aerosol injection tactics and costs in the first 15 years of deployment."
Books
Gernot Wagner has written six books:
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2003: Der Rest der Welt. Ein Reiseführer für überzeugte Daheimbleiber, Wien, Ueberreuter-Verlag 2003,
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2011: But Will The Planet Notice?. New York, Hill & Wang/Farrar Straus & Giroux,
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2015: Climate Shock, joint with Martin Weitzman, Princeton University Press 2015, (Financial Times-McKinsey Top 15 Business Book of the Year 2015. Translated into several languages, including German, which has been awarded Austria's Natural Science Book of the Year 2017.)
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2021: Stadt, Land, Klima: Warum wir nur mit einem urbanen Leben die Erde retten, Brandstätter 2021, . German:
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2021: Geoengineering: The Gamble, Wiley 2021,
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2024: Climate Race, Leykam; a bilingual English-German collection of a dozen monthly columns for Project Syndicate,
Personal life
Wagner has been married since 2002 to Dr. Siri Nippita, a gynecologist at NYU Langone Medical Center and the chief of the family planning division as well as the director of Reproductive Choice at Bellevue Hospital.
They have two children and live in New York City.
See also
External links
