What, fixing pollution is cheaper than not fixing pollution, so we should keep polluting as much as we want? And because the USA is in the privileged position to avoid disaster, it should do nothing to prevent that to happen to others? Is this all we are?
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This is an interesting situation. My prior, based on subjective credibility/plausibility factors, is that there is likely something wrong or misleading with the argument here. But as someone with minimal knowledge of climate science, I have no good way to identify what it is (if anything). I’d love to hear an expert’s take, mostly out of sheer curiosity. For now, from some very casual research, it seems like some potential objections include:
- The author compares projections of climate change’s GDP cost in the US to mitigations’ GDP cost worldwide. But climate change would hit poorer and more low-lying countries harder, so the worldwide cost would probably be a higher percentage. If you want to focus on the US, on the other hand, then the cost of mitigations on the US economy alone would likely be different; my guess is that it would be lower, because we’re a wealthy country with a cleaner starting point than global average, but I could be completely wrong.
- The estimate is of “direct damage to U.S. economy”. What counts as direct versus indirect?
- Comparing economic figures ignores externalities such as increased deaths, refugees, and environmental destruction as considered a harm in itself.
- The author compares GDP to consumption when they are two different measures (no idea if this matters).
- Even if the average cost of mitigations versus cost of not mitigating are comparable, the variability is probably much greater in the latter case, due to the hugely wide-ranging impacts of climate change. Thus there are risks of much higher costs.
- In particular, the author doesn’t attempt to do proper calculations with the probability distributions involved but just ‘eyeballs’ them, so it’s hard to say how valid their comparison is.
For the record, I don’t care about the author’s opinion of the New York Times or the legitimacy of citing a worst-case figure, which they spend so much time complaining about. I’m only interested in their own cost/benefit calculation.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 8.1 ms ] threadThese principles include: individual liberty, free-market economics, entrepreneurship, private property, high moral character, and limited government."
This site is propaganda. Flagging this article.
Sure, it's Reason-esque, but seems silly to flag it because you don't like their opinion.
- The author compares projections of climate change’s GDP cost in the US to mitigations’ GDP cost worldwide. But climate change would hit poorer and more low-lying countries harder, so the worldwide cost would probably be a higher percentage. If you want to focus on the US, on the other hand, then the cost of mitigations on the US economy alone would likely be different; my guess is that it would be lower, because we’re a wealthy country with a cleaner starting point than global average, but I could be completely wrong.
- The estimate is of “direct damage to U.S. economy”. What counts as direct versus indirect?
- Comparing economic figures ignores externalities such as increased deaths, refugees, and environmental destruction as considered a harm in itself.
- The author compares GDP to consumption when they are two different measures (no idea if this matters).
- Even if the average cost of mitigations versus cost of not mitigating are comparable, the variability is probably much greater in the latter case, due to the hugely wide-ranging impacts of climate change. Thus there are risks of much higher costs.
- In particular, the author doesn’t attempt to do proper calculations with the probability distributions involved but just ‘eyeballs’ them, so it’s hard to say how valid their comparison is.
- This: https://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/tag/hsiang-et-al/
For the record, I don’t care about the author’s opinion of the New York Times or the legitimacy of citing a worst-case figure, which they spend so much time complaining about. I’m only interested in their own cost/benefit calculation.