It's always been a main point of mine that good policy avoids *all*
major pitfalls.
I am reminded of the early happy reports from post-Katrina New Orleans
that gleefully announced "the levee is only broken in a couple of
spots". Excellent.
We don't get half marks for avoiding a climate crisis at the cost of
an economic crisis, or vice versa.
On 5/20/07, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> > I don't think many people argue that.
>
> What do you make of John Quiggin's comment over on Stoat:
>> "Could we rule out the risk of economic collapse if we restricted out
>> CO2 emissions (this is, I think, from JA)."
>
> Absolutely. ...
As a response to ""Could we rule out the risk of economic collapse if
we restricted out CO2 emissions" an affirmative response is not as
strong a claim as "there is no possibility of an economics driven
catastrophe". It can be read as a claim that a reasonable policy
exists, not that no unreasonable policy exists.
That said and even so, I acknowledge that Quiggin seems to be making a
bizarrely overconfident claim.
As you know, I fail to see the applicability of that way of thinking,
but even within those terms it seems incoherent at first blush. I
would call it a muddle of a muddle.
I don't have any prior idea who John Quiggin is, and I suggest and
hope he does not represent "many people". I see there is a John
Quiggin who represents himself as the Krugman of the antipodes, but I
have not seen Krugman represent himself as the Quiggin of the eastern
seaboard.
It is certainly possible to make great misery by bad economic policy,
whether energy-related or not. It's pretty disconcerting to see
someone who is apparently an economist claiming otherwise.
This only increases my concern that we don't have much of an economic
theory to base our actions on, and that we have to rethink what we
know about how economics works.
mt
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
Global Change ("globalchange") newsgroup. Global Change is a public, moderated
venue for discussion of science, technology, economics and policy dimensions of
global environmental change.
Posts will be admitted to the list if and only if any moderator finds the
submission to be constructive and/or interesting, on topic, and not
gratuitously rude.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected]
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/globalchange
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
