Casey Jones, the Chair of the IPI, has my greatest respect. He read my response to his blog about climate change and then proceeded to fire back with fact after fact. Great! Check it out, there is some good stuff over there.
Certainly I can (and I think I did) meet his links and raise them with my links. But that’s not really my point. I’m not going to change people who believe in climate change any more than I am going to change their politics or religion. I would never try.
However, to repeat what I said earlier, sustainability is great. I’m all for it. But it must be tempered with common sense and a dash of reality. Money needs to be invested where it can do the most good. To quote from my previous post:
I like Todd Meyers, keynote speaker at PIE’s, approach — Strive for good stewardship. Spend money on sustainability when it makes a difference. Expensive solar panels and wind farms make little economic sense, but that same money could be spent on better design, research, and ways to move us from one energy system to another without bankrupting society. Remember, it will be the least among us who will suffer when economic times worsen.
The same scientists that Casey quotes would have had us follow the Kyoto accords which would most likely have locked most of the developed world in an economic downturn that would make our current recession seem like a blip on the radar. That does no one any good.
My take is that we must take care that the law of unintended consequences doesn’t force itself on us. We ran roughshod into using ethanol then found that the price of corn skyrocketed starving millions in the third world. Its like those balloon animals, when you squeeze here, something pops out somewhere else.
Bjorn Lomborg is certainly not a skeptic and has global warming credentials. If you want to know about the economic effects of some CO2 reduction solutions, visit his web site — Lomborg.com. Nothing alarmist, no sky is falling, but simply economic facts. Life is full of choices, we need to be sure we chose wisely.
JVH
2 Responses
What I find disturbing is Casey’s all or nothing approach. His absolutism does not invite discussion. Note that no one commented on his page. Either the readers of his blog are all in lock-step, or they are afraid to appear to Casey as a “flat-earther”. If the IPI fully endorses this position, then they will miss out on all the practical points you and others make.
One last point, if the NASA scientists aren’t qualified to have an opinion on the climate, where does that put Al Gore in the qualification hierarchy?
Hear Hear