What’s so funny about climate change? The answer, presumably, is nothing at all. Then again, maybe a bit of humor could help us make progress. “Climate is no laughing matter — but it beats crying,” observed Dr. James Hansen, the former director of Goddard’s Institute for Space Studies. “Maybe this is the secret passage into people’s hearts and minds.”
Hansen, who sprang to fame via his 1988 U.S. Senate testimony on the threat posed by global warming, was reacting to The Cartoon Introduction to Climate Change by environmental economist Dr. Yoram Bauman. The 2022 book also earned plaudits from Dr. Jane Lubchenco, the former administrator of NOAA. She called it: “Fresh! Cheeky! Accurate and inspiring! An accessible, friendly, and fun explanation of climate change – free of politics, free of jargon, and fresh with insights. Cartoons you can believe in!” The Wall Street Journal named it one of the “seven best business books about science to give for the holidays.”
Yoram Bauman? Who’s he? The professor describes himself as “The world’s first and only stand-up economist.” A graduate of Reed College who earned a PhD in economics from the University of Washington, Bauman advocates switching taxation from income and property to resource consumption. He is a strong supporter of a revenue-neutral carbon tax. His 1998 book Tax Shift helped inspire British Columbia’s carbon-neutral carbon tax. Bauman started an organization called CarbonWA, which gathered signatures to put such a tax on the Washington ballot in 2016. Had it passed, Washington Initiative 732 would have imposed a steadily increasing tax on emissions of carbon dioxide and used the revenue to offset other taxes.
“Why tax good things when you can tax bad things, like emissions?” he wrote in a New York Times op-ed. “The idea has support from economists across the political spectrum, from Arthur B. Laffer and N. Gregory Mankiw on the right to Peter Orszag and Joseph E. Stiglitz on the left.” Bauman’s goals in life are to spread joy to the world through economics comedy; to reform economics education; and to implement carbon pricing.
Bauman’s road to economic humor began in graduate school. One day, tired of studying, he took a break to write a parody of the “ten principles of economics,” a list popularized in a best-selling introductory economics textbook. “I wrote it for fun and passed it around the department,” he recalled, “because that’s what you do to blow off steam when you’re in graduate school.”
Within a year, the parody was published in a science humor journal, the Annals of Improbable Research (formerly the Journal of Irreproducible Results), and it caught the attention of planners of the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science conference. They invited Bauman to present in the humor section of the conference. He had so much fun that he began performing stand-up as a hobby.
Bauman now lives in Salt Lake City, where he is a leader of Clean The Darn Air, a grassroots effort to put a clean-air-and-climate measure on the ballot in Utah. You can see him perform on a number of YouTube segments, where he has more than a million hits, and he is happy to appear at university, association, and corporate events.