Thursday, September 14, 2006

Greg Easterbrook makes an interesting point.....

In an Atlantic editorial (most of the text is behind a subscriber wall) on climate change Easterbrook points out that

  1. Many environmental threats have been met in the last 50 years, including stratospheric ozone destruction, urban smog, acid rain, and more
  2. In every case the government regulation was necessary, and
  3. In every case the cost was but a small fraction of what even the optimists had claimed
He attributes much of the low cost (3) to market driven technology development motivated by the regulations (2). He points out that politically climate change as framed today is a political loser: "Gloom City" but his bottom line is that
Here’s a different way of thinking about the greenhouse effect: that action to prevent runaway global warming may prove cheap, practical, effective, and totally consistent with economic growth.
Discuss

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Easterbrook is hardly the first to suggest these things.

Amory Lovins (Rocky Mountain Institute) has been saying this for some time now. Of course, he does not have the forum that Easterbrook has, but Lovins is a very inventive physicist and energy efficiency expert and Easterbrook is a know-nothing columnist who makes money by rehashing other people's ideas in his columns.

Why anyone would even read Easterbroook's crap is beyond me.

EliRabett said...

I like the Atlantic? Everyone has his faults.

Still, I think the point is a good one, and I am not one to think that the source is more important than the product.