Bruce McCarl: An Unsung Hero of Climate Change Economics
Around 1985, a large, imposing, energetic man walked into my office and began telling me about his research on technology adoption and farm-system choices. He introduced himself as Bruce McCarl from Oregon State. I had just finished a paper on adoption, and I was embarrassed that I had ignored his work. So I read some of his papers, and they were impressive, coming from a different intellectual tradition. I had been trained in mainstream microeconomics: elegant models, propositions, and empirically estimable questions. McCarl came from a different world. He earned a Ph.D. in operations research from Penn State, and his work had a much more action-oriented approach.
He emphasized solving problems: identifying the key elements, recognizing the major practical constraints, and developing techniques that could guide decisions. His models recognized markets and other factors central to standard economics, but they were part of a broader system rather than the sole focus. McCarl’s work showed me a different and very effective way to understand and solve agricultural problems. He also developed important computer programs that could address some of the biggest practical problems we were facing.
Bruce’s research covered many topics. He became a leading scholar of water economics in Texas, including the management of the Edwards Aquifer. He studied the value of economic models for El Niño and climate change, and he built models of agricultural-sector and forestry activities. In each of these models, the operational quality was amazing and the economic logic flawless. Yet this was not the kind of work that appeared every day in mainstream economics journals. I was glad that agricultural economics journals provided a home for this literature. To me, it helped make agricultural economics unique.
In the 1990s, when Clinton was president, I was involved in the administration’s work on climate change. I worked with a White House group and an EPA group that sought to develop a U.S. climate policy and persuade Congress to support the Kyoto Protocol. We also began organizing conferences on climate change. I realized that one person was providing a unique and important quantitative assessment of the impacts of climate change on agriculture: Bruce McCarl. He was able to estimate how technologies such as low-till and no-till farming, nutrient management, and land-use changes would affect carbon sequestration. He analyzed how agriculture might adapt to mitigation policies and to climate change itself; how climate change would affect crop mix, planting locations, livestock management, and forestry; and how different mitigation strategies might work under alternative climate scenarios.
This work was detailed, practical, and directly relevant to policymaking. Policymakers needed answers to questions about land use, agricultural production, natural resources, and the economic consequences of alternative climate policies. Very few people could provide those answers with the level of detail and credibility that McCarl could. It was remarkable to me that one scholar could put all these pieces together.
In 2020, Rudy Naiga, the department chair at Texas A&M, offered me a Hagler Scholar appointment in the department. That meant I would come to Texas A&M for roughly 30 to 40 days each year to work with faculty, engage with students, and contribute to research. I was excited by the opportunity — not only because it came with good remuneration, but because I was genuinely intrigued by McCarl and his distinctive style of work.
I discovered that Bruce had built an extraordinary research group. He treats his students like family, while training them to tackle difficult practical problems with rigor, creativity, and a deep sense of purpose. His lab included talented people from all over the world who were skilled in methods that were rare in the profession. Together, they created a comprehensive approach to predicting the impacts of climate change and other natural-resource policies. No wonder that Bruce is one of the Climate change Nobel Lauraete. He treated his students like family, while training them to tackle difficult practical problems with rigor, creativity, and a deep sense of purpose.
I found Bruce and his wife Lynn to be extremely warm and friendly. We went to multiple dinners together with other faculty members and to basketball games. He showed me the different facets of College Station and was very generous with his time and attention. He made me feel at home there.
With Bruce and Rudy’s guidance, I got to understand the difference between Berkeley and Texas A&M. Berkeley is able to recruit many more American graduate students, and emphasizes publishing in top journals and recognizition by mainstream economics. In A&M, most of the Ph.D.s are international, from diverse countries like Nepal, Iran, Nigeria, etc., and the emphasis is to solve pratical agricultural economic problems. Some of them are very bright and capable, but on average, lack the polish that Berkeley students have. Many of the students will go back to their countries and work at local universities. McCarl was amazing in his ability to continue wokring with his international students and help them to address their own challenges. Their papers were published in diverse agricultural and scientific journals (varying from Nature to Agronomy and Water, field journals). The papers were numerical and future-oriented. They relied on econmetrics but tried to develop trends and projections without overemphasis on rigorous causality tests. But they were very useful and relevant, very good in utilizing multiple data sources and addressing diverse problems in a practical way. Bruce is proud in being a problem solver in the agricultural resource and economics field, not an economist that happens to work on agriculture. In this regard, I find him as a kindred spirit.
I missed Bruce’s retirement party last week, but I felt that I was there in spirit, and I look forward to continuing to collaborate with him and to seeing him and Lynn when I am in College Station. Knowing Bruce helped me appreciate his genius, and the fact that outstanding scholars may appear in different shapes and with different emphases. By their diversity, they make our research much more relevant and useful. I salute Bruce and Lynn, and I look forward to seeing them as they enter this next stage of their lives.
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