Slow Burn offers a rich synthesis of current research in environmental economics. R. Jisung Park brings together an impressive body of evidence-based research to illustrate dimensions of climate change that are often overlooked.
The book opens with an assessment of the damages that climate change is likely to cause. It emphasizes two important aspects that have been a major focus of the scholarly literature but are probably misunderstood or underestimated by the broader public. The first is that climate change will have, and already has, consequences for a much wider range of outcomes than is often assumed. The second is that even what may seem like small amounts of warming, or seemingly small effects, can have major consequences, which is what gives the book its title.
In particular, the book reviews in detail the empirical evidence on the impact of climate not only on agricultural yields and GDP but also more broadly on learning, crime, mental health, judicial decisions, and immigration, among other domains. Park also acknowledges that this literature has largely focused on documenting statistical relationships, but remains limited in its understanding of the mechanisms underlying those relationships and of how they relate to one another, which is especially important when trying to understand how climate change may affect future outcomes.
The question of crime is a good example to illustrate these limitations, and the author’s discussion is particularly useful for conceptualizing the different mechanisms. There are three main hypotheses for why studies have consistently found that crime is higher during warmer days: a heat-aggression hypothesis, in which heat triggers an almost physiological response; an incentive-based mechanism, in which weather changes alter the costs and benefits of other activities; and an interaction-based mechanism, in which people spend more time outside, encounter more others, and, therefore, have more opportunities for crime. Without knowing which of these mechanisms is at work, it becomes difficult to know what will happen under a warming climate and whether the observed relationship can be extrapolated. Are people going to spend more and more time outside as temperatures rise? Are these changes in incentives going to remain stable? More generally, these questions ask whether what matters is the deviation from the existing norm or the absolute temperature level itself, and the same would be true for the statistical relationships between weather and other outcomes. These unknowns also pose important questions about the capacity of society to adapt, which the author discusses especially well in the final chapters.
Slow Burn does a very good job of highlighting that even small and gradual effects of weather or pollution matter. Such effects have indeed been the focus of much of the recent empirical literature in environmental economics. At the same time, it is worth asking whether this emphasis reflects the substantive importance of these localized and more gradated shocks, or whether it also reflects the fact that empirical researchers have been better able to identify and measure these small changes in weather patterns, pollution rates, and so forth. Recent work by Adrien Bilal and Diego R Känzig suggests that this perspective may miss an important part of the picture, as the common impact of global temperature on the world economy may be much larger than what is inferred from estimates based on local idiosyncratic variation (see their 2026 paper in The Quarterly Journal of Economics). Global temperature is also more strongly associated with extreme events than local temperature. Overall, while this book rightly emphasizes that small local deviations matter a great deal, a focus on their impact alone may understate the total damages by an order of magnitude.
Park devotes specific attention to the distributional aspects of climate change, which are central and part of what makes it a unique political challenge. Climate change has distributional consequences across many dimensions: across generations, sectors of the economy, countries, workers and consumers, and social classes. Adaptation to climate change is also deeply unequal. What serves as adaptation for some may, in fact, impose additional costs on others: air conditioning warms streets and emits carbon, while food delivery during weather shocks shifts the burden of exposure onto delivery workers, who are not compensated for the resulting health risks, as shown in a 2024 working paper by Anna Papp. What serves as a shock absorber for some can become a shock amplifier for others.
One idea to which the author alludes is that, because the consequences of climate warming are nonlinear, every additional ton of carbon already emitted raises the value of avoiding the next one. It is therefore never “too late” to reduce emissions; on the contrary, mitigation becomes more consequential as warming advances. Pushed one step further, the same logic applies to collective action: for a given individual or country, the importance of reducing emissions only grows when others fail to do so. Of course, coordination dynamics can work in the opposite direction, since individuals or countries may be discouraged from acting when others fail to do so.
All of Park’s evidence leaves two questions: why, if such action to stop planetary heating would be so valuable, is so little being done, and what role politics plays in that inaction? Most ambitious climate policies have been opposed in democratic contexts, and it remains difficult to understand exactly where the political process breaks down. Does this lack of political will stem from voters, whose demand for such policies may be limited? In a 2025 article in The American Economic Review, Antoine Dechezleprêtre and co-authors have shown that most voters are, in fact, aware of the damages of climate change and of its anthropogenic nature, but that they may instead have difficulty believing that the proposed policies would actually be effective. Or does the primary obstacle to climate action lie with the politicians, who may see climate politics as electorally costly or who face internal and external pressures that prevent them from implementing such policies? A 2025 working paper by Matilde Bombardini and co-authors examines jointly how political demand and supply respond to climate shocks and climate incentives, showing that candidate supply may be the primary constraint on climate policy rather than voter demand.
More generally, the broader pattern may be that politicians and governments often face incentives that push in the wrong direction. For instance, Allan Hsiao, in a 2023 working paper, shows that anticipated government protection against sea level rise produced a moral hazard in Jakarta, which ultimately sustained development in exposed areas and delayed inland migration. Similarly, Zane Kashner, in a 2025 working paper, shows that local governments in the United States constrain wind-farm construction and, in particular, may be more reluctant to permit such projects than local voter demand alone would suggest.
Overall, while closing this excellent book, I was left wondering whether the political inertia we seem to face is itself tied to the “slow burn” of climate change: are we, like the boiling frog, insufficiently responsive to a threat that unfolds gradually? Would society react more strongly if the danger were sudden and imminent? It is unclear whether a more immediate threat would resolve all of these obstacles to action; some of them may reflect features of climate politics that go beyond the slow-moving and incremental nature of climate change.
