Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Global Warmings

The problem with the global warming debate is that the science (which I believe is incontrovertible) is used to draw the wrong conclusions. At the end of the wickipedia article there is a fairly good estimate of the cost of the impacts of global warming. But what is not there is an estimate of the cost of "doing something" to try and prevent global warming. Basically what it comes down to is this: significantly reducing greenhouse emissions can only be done by crippling the world economically. While the costs associated with global warming could be trillions of US dollars, the costs associated with the various Kyoto-style plans to reduce greenhouse emissions are in the hundreds of trillions, with no guarantee that they would work.

The number one killer of human beings is not heat, or cold, or tornados, or hurricanes, or droughts, or any other climate-related disaster. It is poverty. And the only cure for poverty is increased productivity that can raise standards of living. The cost of coercively shackling world productivity to reduce emissions will be a drastic increase in world poverty, and poverty brings starvation, disease, misery, and death on unimagineable scales.

Human beings live in every environment on Earth, from the blistering cold to the blistering heat. Some places will get worse, and some places will actually get better. People will have to move. But they will have decades over which to do it. There's already enough poverty in the world. Don't advocate policies that will multiply it ten or a hundred fold.

No comments: