Global Warming

[Borodog]

The only way of cutting world greenhouse emissions that does not rely on technologies that don't exist yet is to cut productivity. Cutting productivity lowers standards of living. Lowering standards of living in much of the world means lowering it below subsistence level. That means people die, and lots of them. A 2% decrease in the planet's population is 120 million people dead.

Government environmental interventions have already killed of order a hundred million people in the DDT/malaria case alone.

Poverty kills. Stossel has an excellent point in his book where he shows how many days are taken off the average American life by various risks. So many days for car accidents, so many months for alcoholism, 4 years or something for smoking. The largest, by far and not even close, was being poor. Which took a whopping decade off the average poor American's life. Can you imagine how many decades are lost annually to poverty in the third world where there is no capitalism to raise the standard of living?

[HLMencken]

[ QUOTE ]
The only way of cutting world greenhouse emissions that does not rely on technologies that don't exist yet is to cut productivity. Cutting productivity lowers standards of living. Lowering standards of living in much of the world means lowering it below subsistence level. That means people die, and lots of them. A 2% decrease in the planet's population is 120 million people dead.

[/ QUOTE ]

I call b.s.

Let's use one atmospheric pollutant--carbon monoxide--as a representative case.

Based on EPA data, total national emissions (total, not per capita) of carbon monoxide decreased by 31% from 1970 to 1998. [Report (big file, see Fig. 3-1)]. You know what? The world economy didn't collapse over this time, in fact it has boomed--and hundreds of millions haven't died either, in fact, standard of living has improved on the whole.

Your doomsday scenarios regarding GHG control are completely overblown.

[Borodog]

Dude. So many fallacies. The level of emissions going down does not cause economic collapse. Please read carefully. Carbon monoxide is not carbon dioxide. People are talking about drastically cutting carbon dioxide emissions. The technologies to do this economically do not exist. So the only way to do it is to coercively cut productivity. Period.

Furthermore, what caused the drop in carbon monoxide emissions? How do you know how many more or less people would or would not have died in those 30 years under different circumstances? It's counterfactual, and I seriously doubt you've done the research to be able to say anything meaningful about it. I daresay that if capitalism weren't shackled and the division of labor interrupted for most of the last century, world standard of living would be far higher right now, and hundreds of millions of people would not have died.

[HLMencken]

I respectfully disagree with your assessment.

Incidentally, I am not advocating that we increase regulation. I am merely disagreeing with your assessment that any attempt to regulate greenhouse gases will bring the world to its knees with hundreds of millions dead. You can easily pick and choose when it comes to conjectures like this. One could just as easily say that advances in technology and economic progress result in far more dead through wars and conflicts, as the twentieth century gives plenty of evidence for. I am not making this argument, just disputing the implicit claim that anything that causes an increase in GDP is always good for the world.

[timotheeeee]

I think his point is that anything that is less economical is by definition bad for the world, which doesn't conflict with denying that "anything that causes an increase in GDP is always good for the world."

But don't listen to me. I've never dabbled in 'supercomputing.'

Edit: I guess I should've used "worse" instead of "bad" above.

[HLMencken]

[ QUOTE ]
I think his point is that anything that is less economical is by definition bad for the world, which doesn't conflict with denying that "anything that causes an increase in GDP is always good for the world."

But don't listen to me. I've never dabbled in 'supercomputing.'

[/ QUOTE ]

Well, I still dispute the claim. Let's take an extreme extension of global warming (again, I am not advocating any regulation)...

Say a ginat meteor is heading for earth and is going to wipe out the planet. Is it bad for the world if resources were utilized to develop a solution to knock the meteor off path--even if it hurt the world's economy a bit?

[timotheeeee]

It would obviously be more economical in the long run to stop the meteor.