From: CurtAdams@aol.com
Date: Thu Jul 25 2002 - 14:06:49 MDT
In a message dated 7/25/02 7:34:27, szegedy@or.uni-bonn.de writes:
>OK. but with this argument, you agree, that the "ecological doomsayers"
>perform
>an important role in market-regulation: namely trying to influence the
>publicity of some product with known negative global effects.
The "ecologically concerned" perform a useful service, by pointing out
significant possible costs of current actions or inactions. Sadly, they
often don't consider the values and costs of their actions and their
proposals are rarely good ideas. This doesn't *have* to be, it just
usually is. The "other side" has its problems too, notably that potential
risks are often talked down rather than honestly investigated.
A typical irony is that the "eco-concious" state of California just
passed a law that will greatly restrict CO2 emissions from vehicles
while the "eco-insensitive" Bush administration is pushing for
catalytic converters on truck. The irony is that what the Bush
administration is pushing willl do far more good at far less cost.
The "eco-doomsayers" may, actually, have slowed things down a
bit as frenzied paranoia about ozone has diverted resources from
particulate pollution, which turns out to be the real problem.
But the "eco-doomsayers" serve no useful purpose. They greatly
overstate the possible hazards and this causes the public to greatly
oversetimate eco-hazards, to the point of distracting the public
and causing severe misallocations of resources and risk taking.
The worst global warming scenarios are still quite manageable:
there's no doom coming. It may well be that intelligent management
of Co2 emissions may result in an even better situation but
the current hazard is overwhelmingly that unnecessary restrictions
on fossil fuel use could cause economic dislocations, abort 3rd world
development, and result in all sorts of undesirable miseries.
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