Not really, but George Will uses in his Newsweek column the same example Steven Hayward offered in National Review to explain the absurdity of moral crusades that ignore cost-benefit analysis.
If you want to skip the links, the idea is that we could save millions of lives and prevent millions of injuries by lowering the road speed limit to 5 miles per hour. We don’t take that step because of the monumentally harmful economic consequences.
Will, Hayward, and Bjorn Lomborg (whose book prompted both columns) argue that global warming alarmists are arguing for the equivalent of the 5 mph speed limit.
Will ends his piece this way:
Sums that are small relative to the cost of trying to fine-tune the planet’s climate could prevent scores of millions of deaths from AIDS, unsafe drinking water and other clear and present dangers. If nations concert to impose antiwarming measures commensurate with the hyperbole about the danger, the damage to global economic growth could cause in this century more preventable death and suffering than was caused in the last century by Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot combined. Nobel Peace Prize, indeed.
