Neil Reynolds, Toronto Globe and Mail columnist, former global warming denier and now, it seems, a mitigation skeptic, wrote on Friday:
Without heroic government intervention, [economist Richard Tol] says, climate change will probably cause damage equal to losing two years of economic growth [a few percent of income according to the abstract of Tol's paper] - co-incidentally the same damage caused by an average recession.
Neglecting the fact that Tol's paper, published by Bjorn Lomborg's Copenhagen Consensus Centre, omits the Stern Review from its Table 1. list of studies on the 'estimates of welfare loss due to climate change', and underestimates damage from climate change...
If there were a flood and 50 million people in Bangladesh perished, world 'wealth' would decrease less than 1 percent - they would mostly be poor people. Lomborg and Tol would then claim that we could make that up with a year or two of economic growth?!
I wish I were Jon Stewart so I could sit there in stunned silence, as only he can, and then say, "Yeah... flood... 50 million poor people die, then after a year or two of global economic growth we'd be all square again ... WTF".
2 comments:
It seems to me that all areas of human society have been colonized by a 'technical-rational' attitude toward action. Scientist as much as anyone have been guilty of failing to insist on the moral content of all action, whether scientific or political. The value of the lives of the people in Bangladesh cannot be quantified but contemporary ideology drives toward the quantification of everything. It is time for everyone to recall that the question "what is" is very important but of equal importance is "what do we want to be."
Thanks for that supportive comment kirbycairo. Very true what you say and I have to admit that I need to be careful about that attitude too. Quantification is helpful for making arguments clear, though.
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