On Feb 22, 8:38 am, Ken Caldeira <kcalde...@carnegie.stanford.edu> wrote: > On the other hand, if the Romans had discovered fossil fuels and had a > fossil-fueled industrial revolution, they would have maximized their net > present value and we would be here two millennia later with rising seas, > acidified oceans, melting ice caps, diminished biodiversity, etc, finding > little solace in the fact that they followed the path their economists told > them was economically optimal.
Perhaps. But we would have built on that wealth and be even wealthier than we are now, and so better able to deal with the altered climate, oceans, and biosphere that they caused (assuming they didn't cause a complete collapse of the ecosystem). Maybe we would have already perfected fusion by now. One of the economists in Bjorn Lomberg's Copenhagen Consensus group pointed out that someone in our future, say 100 years from now and several times wealthier than we are, will be puzzled if he looks back on us and wonders why we decided not to pursue our own best economic interest on his behalf. I grew up in a house with a coal furnace. Should my parents -- who were not even middle class then and struggled to get by -- not have burned coal, which was the cheapest option for them where I lived (western PA), because it would alter the climate and oceans? I don't know what else they would have done for heat. Eventually my father did better and we bought an oil furnace and then a nicer house, and then an even nicer house (but still middle class) with gas heat and A/C. I have to admit Lomborg's economist makes a lot of sense -- today I would have been puzzled if my parents had not heated with coal, but had taken out a loan to buy an oil furnace. (They couldn't even afford a proper bathroom, but had a toilet in a closet and a shower in the basement.) And now today we have all kinds of technologies to employ on the energy/climate problem that they did not have, and on living overall -- we can build seawalls if we have to. The future will have even cheaper options. David St Helens, OR http://www.davidappell.com -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To post to this group, send email to geoengineering@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering?hl=en.
