Nobel Laureate Lars Peter Hansen: Technology is more promising than global political consensus

[Robot hand holding a tree grounded with soil]
Paper Boat Creative

Technological advancement in the climate space represents a potentially more promising path forward than waiting for global political cooperation, according to Lars Peter Hansen, professor at the University of Chicago.

During a CNBC interview, the Nobel laureate said that current methods for valuing climate policy impacts need significant improvement, particularly when dealing with long-term projections fraught with uncertainty.

Uncertainty must be central to global climate policy discussions, as “we need to make policy in the face of uncertainty, and we need to be open about it. We need to give up on the false pretense of knowledge.”

He said that global leadership on climate issues appears to be moving in the wrong direction, with populist politics fostering short-term economic thinking rather than long-term planning.

“It makes it very difficult to establish credible long term policy gains and goals,” Hansen noted, adding that political coordination on a global scale will be “incredibly challenging.”

Current political environments, particularly in the U.S., have created significant setbacks for climate initiatives with massive pullbacks in government-funded research, he said, and expressed serious concern about this trend, stating, “It’s not only money going into it, it’s also intellectual capital going into it. Smart people are not going to see great prospects here in terms of their short-term futures… and they’ll be looking to other ventures.”

Lastly, Hansen advocated for a “long game” strategy focused on investing in carbon capture technologies and potentially revolutionary energy sources like nuclear fusion, while acknowledging these solutions may be decades away.

“I think it’s important that even though these are highly uncertain prospects that we consider investments across the board, [that] we get some successes along some of the demand,” he concluded, while emphasizing that short-term emission reductions remain necessary to “buy us more time.”

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