Passing the Buck

Jan and I had a discussion about global warming at park day last week. Jan is a skeptic about global warming and thinks there is a good possibility that any global trends of warmer temperatures could be normal cyclical effects. I am far less skeptical. The mechanism that is most likely causing global warming is well understood, though the warming trend has been far less severe than would be expected by the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere since the beginning of the industrial revolution. I'm more of a Bjorn Lomborg environmentalist - I agree that climate change exists and may be a problem, but I disagree with most of the proposals to combat it. I think I am not averse to a revenue neutral Pigouvian carbon tax or an equivalent (auctioned) cap and trade system.

I'll give you an example why climate change remedies are problematic. Most of the projections for global warming look at negative effects that will become really problematic in 100 -200 years. If you expect economic growth to continue at the present rate, people living 200 years from now will be immensely more wealthy than we are now and the costs of climate change will be fairly easily mitigated. If economic growth continues at the current long-term rate of 2.3%, the average American in 2400 will have an inflation-adjusted income of over $350 MILLION. Technology change will further make the world a different place.

Consider, for example, whether you would rather have your life now, or trade places with one of the Rockefellers in the early 20th century. The robber baron families were immensely wealthy one hundred years ago. They could afford anything in the world. And yet - my relatively poor family has two cars that operate at a level of performance absolutely unheard of 100 years ago. We enjoy year round access to exotic foods, refrigeration, air conditioning, microwaves, convenient air travel, access to knowledge and information at a moment's notice, ESPN and ESPN2, Friday Night Lights, Cherry Coke Zero, snowboarding, wakeboarding, video games, movies, - basically every single thing on my top ten list of things that make my life more enjoyable has been invented or made widely available in the last century (besides family and books - though I certainly enjoy more time with my family than the Rockefellers and I have easy access to a huge amount of novels at the Mesa Public Library). Then there are all the things that we have that the rich used to pay people to do, but that we do in a fraction of the time because of dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, washing machines, etc...

It's not even close - Most people in contemporary America live way better than the richest people in the world even a century ago.

So after we take a minute to be grateful for all of those things that we enjoy, we should consider how different the world may be before we spend an absurd amount on saving some coastline in 2200. That doesn't mean we should do nothing; we just need to be smarter about the issues involved and what costs are reasonable given the circumstances.