Almost daily Corner bashing

Julia Eilperin writes a perfectly reasonable article describing the findings of two new climate change papers. Jim Manzi pounces unsurprisingly, noting that rich people in the future will be even richer than rich people now, even if we let rich people now keep polluting at their current rates, and laughing at the notion that global warming “is a classic inter-generational debate, where the short-term benefits of emitting carbon accrue mainly to us and where the dangers of them are largely put off until future generations." Quite a knee-slapper, that.

Comments

Brian:

I don't that is an entirely fair summary of what I said. In fact, most economists predict that in a century a majority of people in the developing world will be about as rich as the average person in the developed world is today.

Any costs of carbon accumulation will be disproportionately paid by them, but so will any costs of reduced economic development and deferred wealth creation that are produced by efforts to mitigate emissions.

My criticism of the WaPo article was that it failed to even recognize these trade-offs.

Posted by: Jim Manzi on March 12, 2008 03:58 PM

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