It is mandated to periodically assess the academic literature on climate change, its impacts, and policy interventions. The IPCC is a joint venture of the World Meteorological Organization and the UN Environment Programme (Oppenheimer et al. This carries over to other, similar organisations. I argue that it has a natural monopoly and that it therefore should be regulated rather than broken up. Let us consider one such monopolist, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In many cases, there is an assessment bureau, a think-tank, or a committee that, de facto or de jure, is the single provider of academic knowledge to policymakers. Alas, governments do not always work that way. Get a bunch of smart, knowledgeable, open-minded people and let them thrash out what might work. The most you can do is rely on the best available knowledge and change course if need be. For complex, large-scale, long-term problems, on the other hand, we rely on experts to design a policy – but we will not know whether we have made the right decisions until much later, if ever. I do not know how to build or repair a laptop, but I do know when it is broken. That is fine as long as there is a mechanism to remove charlatans. Yet the volume of scientific knowledge is now so vast that no single person can understand more than a fraction. Intellectual led to explosive technological progress – which allowed you to sit in a comfortable chair in a nice office reading my words from a remote server on a flat screen. Everyone was free to propose a hypothesis that A caused B, and experimentation and observation separated the wheat from the chaff. It described how the world worked and prescribed how people should behave. In the olden days, the Church had a monopoly on the truth.
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