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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.
My $0.02 on global warming.
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Boro,
Once again, you are wrong on many points. Number one, even if it did cost trillions that doesn't cripple the economy it strengthens it. Where do you think the money goes? Into a black hole? It goes into the economy in terms of expenditures on new equipment and technologies. It creates jobs. It is a trillion dollar shot in the arm.
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Broken Window Fallacy.
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You are just parroting the standard response when it comes to environmental regulations and it effects on industry. It has been shown that environmental regulations actually create jobs instead of losing them. The other health and environmental benefits are just a plus. They said the clean air and water act would destroy some industries - didn't happen. The recovery of the Great Lakes region has added hundreds of thousands of jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars into the economies of the Great Lake states.
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Correlation does not imply causation.
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Down in Tampa the local power company (Tampa Electric) spent almost a billion dollars converting their plant to more efficient natural gas instead of fighting the environmentalists. A billion dollars. Did it hurt them??? Nope. They recovered it in 3 years because they were so much more efficient. The CEO, a republican could not believe it. They are more profitable now than ever before. The area residents no longer complain of breathing and sinus problems. And they ended up added almost a billion into the economy.
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Uh, your point? A business switched to a more efficient technology when it was profitable and hence made more money from it? Thanks for making my point.
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You are also partly wrong about this - "the only cure for poverty is increased productivity that can raise standards of living." This is true to a point but there are not enough resources in the world to support every human at the same standard of living as say the United States. We would end of completely depleting the world's natural recourses and then there would be a disastrous decline in everyone's standard of living.
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Seriously:
Read. Increasing productivity includes lowering costs, i.e. the value of inputs. Capitalism is rooted in conservation, i.e. using as few resources as is technologically possible to produce the product, thus leaving more scarce resources available for other uses. The longer capitalism is allowed to operate, the more efficient the economy becomes. You don't [censored] with the conservation machine if you want conservation to go up.
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Your 2 cents aren't worth a penny.
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How pseudo-witty.