In September, Gernot Wagner hosted an unusual visitor at his small New York City

apartment.

“The president of Austria dropped by” while he was in town for the United Nations
General Assembly, says Wagner, a climate economist at New York University. And
in President Alexander Van der Bellen’s hand was a printout of a Nature commentary
that Wagner had written with his colleagues earlier this year.

The article offered advice on how to calculate the social cost of carbon — a metric
that puts a monetary value on the future damage that climate change will cause. They
discussed the piece for a good 15 minutes of the president’s one-hour visit — and Van
der Bellen, an economist by training, was just one of the top climate policymakers
who consulted Wagner about the piece.