Posted on 04/19/2014 6:40:47 PM PDT by Lorianne
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which pools the efforts of scientists around the globe, has begun releasing draft chapters from its latest assessment, and, for the most part, the reading is as grim as you might expect. We are still on the road to catastrophe without major policy changes.
But there is one piece of the assessment that is surprisingly, if conditionally, upbeat: Its take on the economics of mitigation. Even as the report calls for drastic action to limit emissions of greenhouse gases, it asserts that the economic impact of such drastic action would be surprisingly small. In fact, even under the most ambitious goals the assessment considers, the estimated reduction in economic growth would basically amount to a rounding error, around 0.06 percent per year.
What’s behind this economic optimism? To a large extent, it reflects a technological revolution many people don’t know about, the incredible recent decline in the cost of renewable energy, solar power in particular.
People on both the left and the right often fail to understand this point. On the left, you sometimes find environmentalists asserting that to save the planet we must give up on the idea of an ever-growing economy; on the right, you often find assertions that any attempt to limit pollution will have devastating impacts on growth. But there’s no reason we can’t become richer while reducing our impact on the environment.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Computer models aren't science.
"Consensus" isn't science.
Demagoguery isn't science.
This Guy is a PUTZ!!
Talk to China, Paul.
The faults of that analysis are not clear.....
I see that Krugman has picked another topic which he knows nothing about. First economics, and now heat transfer.
Salvation???? From ‘Mother Nature’???
And Russia.
I’m getting off fossil fuels forever!! I’m transitioning to the only real renewable multi-purpose fuel - whale oil.
Oh my, lol, so do you live in Alaska? How does one acquire large quantities of whale oil?
No, I’ll be cloning several hundred whales for release into the Great Lakes and tagging them so nobody else can claim them.
rofl...improvise.
Inequality Initiative as CUNY pays Paul Krugman 25,000 per month (225,000 total to discuss income inequality.
International governmental panel on climate change otherwise known as a comfortable sinecure for otherwise unemployable layabouts
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