A consistent theme within the John Locke Foundation’s critique of global warming debates is the willful ignorance of tradeoffs.
Report after report highlights the fact that taking any meaningful step to reduce the global temperature would require far more sacrifice than alarmists are willing to publicize.
Now Steven Hayward offers a good analogy in the latest National Review, as he discusses Bjorn Lomborg’s new book, Cool It:
Consider the case of a persistent cause of over 1.2 million deaths, 50 million injuries, and a half-trillion dollars in damages worldwide every year. Then ponder that a simple policy change could eliminate nearly all of this harm. The cause: automobile accidents. The remedy: Lower the speed limit to 5 miles per hour. But of course no nation would ever do this, because it would make us so much poorer. The benefits of auto use outweigh the risks, such that we don’t even consider a modest reduction in speed limits, which studies show would significantly reduce auto-accident casualties. Instead, we invest in safer highways, air bags, seat belts, and other means to reduce the human cost of driving.
The use of fossil fuels presents the same tradeoff. As Lomborg states, “the benefits from moderately using fossil fuels vastly outweigh the costs.” If anything, Lomborg understates this point. The tradeoff for arguably increasing the average global temperature by 0.8 [degrees Celsius] in the 20th century has been nearly a doubling in life expectancy, a huge decline in infant mortality, and the steadily increasing spread of middle-class prosperity across the planet’s population. Does anyone outside the tiny ranks of environmental extremists really wish we had not made this progress, which depended vitally on cheap energy?
