Looking Backward, Looking Forward

This essay discusses three themes of my scholarly life from my student days up to today. They involve technological change, environmental accounting, and energy-climate-economic analysis. These themes have common analytical roots in the economic theory of public goods and encounter thorny issues of governance because of the Westphalian roots of international law and practice. Many of the issues, such as devising measures of natural capital and the need for strengthened international institutions, are just as pressing today as they were during my student days in the 1960s. In writing this, the enduring insight is that hindsight is the best foresight.