Time magazine celebrates my Stanford colleague Adrien Bilal

 Time magazine celebrates my Stanford colleague Adrien Bilal

TIME100 Next 2026: The World's Most Influential Rising Stars: Adrien Bilal  Sep 30, 2026  by Bill McKibben

"Economists failed badly in the early years of the climate fight, assuring the world that real damage wouldn’t come until late in this century. Now, amid fires, floods, and soaring insurance premiums, Stanford University’s Adrien Bilal has offered a far more coherent analysis of the economic effects, and potential costs, of climate change. He wrote, for instance, that if we increase the planet’s temperature by an additional 2°C, “we found that would reduce output and consumption by 50%. That’s a big reduction. It’s twice as big as the Great Depression but it’s going on forever.” As his award-­winning seminal study dryly notes, “these impacts suggest that unilateral decarbonization policy is cost-effective for large countries such as the United States,” which is econospeak for “what on earth are you doing propping up coal plants and shutting down wind farms?”