William Nordhaus Has Died. Nobelist Influenced Climate Policy.

William D. Nordhaus, a Yale economist and Nobel laureate who tabulated the economic wreckage of carbon emissions and influenced climate policy across several presidential administrations, died on Friday at his home in New Haven. He was 85. The cause was glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer, according to a statement from Yale University. In 2018, Professor Nordhaus shared the Nobel in economic science with Paul M. Romer, an economist at New York University.

The Nobel committee cited Professor Nordhaus’s work in developing a method to balance climate change’s long-term damage with the costs required to contain it. Image Professor Nordhaus, left, receiving the Nobel Prize from King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden, in Stockholm in 2018. Credit... Jonathan Nackstrand/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images The model, which Professor Nordhaus refined over decades, has underpinned dozens of regulations around the world aimed at limiting fossil fuels and seeded the ground for a new field of research that bridges the gap between economics and earth science.

“He played a crucial role in terms of bringing consideration of the natural environment into the mainstream of economics, whereas earlier, it was sort of a fringe area,” said Robert Stavins, director of the environmental economics program at Harvard, who wrote about Professor Nordhaus’s impact . We are having trouble retrieving the article content. Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings. Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

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