The Mises Institute article today by David Reisman is a review of Sir Nicholas Stern’s report on the economics of global climate change.
Here is a sample:
Whether
or not they are aware of it, in attempting to combat alleged global
warming, Sir Nicholas, and the rest of the environmentalists, are
urging a policy of deliberate counteractive global climate change by
the world’s governments. They want the world’s governments to change
the world’s climate from the path that they believe it is otherwise
destined to take. They want the world’s governments to make the earth’s
climate cooler than they believe it will otherwise be as the next two
centuries or more unfold. But their policy of climate control is the
most stupid one imaginable. It’s more stupid than a modern-day
equivalent of a savage’s attempting to control nature by the sacrifice
of his goat.The
reason it’s more stupid, much more stupid, is that the goat that they
want to sacrifice is most of modern industrial civilization ? the part
that depends on the 80% of the carbon emissions they want to eliminate,
and which will not be replaced through any magical power of words to
create and control reality, however much they may believe in that
power. It is precisely modern industrial civilization and its further
expansion and intensification that is mankind’s means of coping with
all aspects of nature, including, if it should ever actually be
necessary, the ability to control the earth’s climate, whether to cool
it down or to warm it up.
