2.09.2007

This is rich...

Jonah Goldberg:
Earth got about 0.7 degrees Celsius warmer in the 20th century while it increased its GDP by 1,800 percent, by one estimate. How much of that 0.7 degrees can be laid at the feet of that 1,800 percent is unknowable, but let’s stipulate that all of the warming was the result of our prosperity and that this warming is in fact indisputably bad (which is hardly obvious).

That’s still an amazing bargain. Life expectancies in the United States increased from about 47 years to about 77 years. Literacy, medicine, leisure and even, in many respects, the environment have improved mightily over the course of the 20th century, at least in the prosperous West.

Given the option of getting another 1,800 percent richer in exchange for another 0.7 degrees warmer, I’d take the heat in a heartbeat. Of course, warming might get more expensive for us (and we might get a lot richer than 1,800 percent too). There are tipping points in every sphere of life, and what cost us little in the 20th century could cost us enormously in the 21st — at least that’s what we’re told. ...
Shifting weather patterns leading to droughts in some places and floods in others, the ever nagging worry that the arctic and Greenland ice sheets might melt, thereby raising sea levels and desalinating the oceans, disrupted agriculture and displaced ecosystems; they all don't bother me nearly as much as having to curtail my own greed.
The costs are just too high for too little payoff. Even if the Kyoto Protocol were put into effect tomorrow — a total impossibility — we’d barely affect global warming. Jerry Mahlman of the National Center for Atmospheric Research speculated in Science magazine that “it might take another 30 Kyotos over the next century” to beat back global warming.

Thirty Kyotos! That’s going to be tough considering that China alone plans on building an additional 2,200 coal plants by 2030. Oh, but because China (like India) is exempt from Kyoto as a developing country, the West will just have to reduce its own emissions even more.
If we don't burn it, someone else will!
Frankly, I don’t think the trade-off is worth it — yet. The history of capitalism and technology tells us that what starts out expensive and arduous becomes cheap and easy over time.
What? Like taking the first step towards higher efficiency standards now, knowing that the next step might just be easier to take?
Lewis and Clark took months to do what a truck carrying Tickle-Me Elmos does every week. Technology 10 years from now could solve global warming at a fraction of today’s costs. What technologies? I don’t know. Maybe fusion. Maybe hydrogen. Maybe we’ll harness the perpetual motion of Sen. Joe Biden’s mouth.
Yes! As long as we don't take the first steps now someone else down the road will likely invent a non-polluting flying car that will save us all. As long as the other guy takes the first step out of the sheer need to survive, what do I care?

I guess we should count ourselves lucky that at least he didn't base his article on Monckton's hack-job like Rich Lowry did. Aticles like these from 'The National Review', should come in handy when the grandchildren demand some explanations.

Update: And then of course there's these facts Goldberg gets wrong, via busybusybusy.