Thanks for the heads up regarding the study. I was unaware of it.

I’m curious as to what Master Resource makes of this paper by Sterner and Persson: (http://reep.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/rem024v1)?

To summarise, the authors introduce relative price changes into the discount debate so as to account for imperfect substitution between manmade and environmental goods. To my mind, this rectifies an obvious shortcoming of most economic analyses, which fail to account for increasing relative price changes (e.g. water scarcity in the case of persistent drought) when considering the potential impacts of climate change. (Let’s just leave the ‘certainty’ – or lack thereof – of the actual science for a moment, and indulge the economic permutations…)

Their results – using an adapted Norhaus DICE model – indicate that strong, swift action against climate change would be justified even in the presence of high discount rates (as proposed by the many critics of Stern) when one allows for imperfect substitution between manmade and environmental captial…

As I understand the more cornucopian view supported on this website to argue logically in favour of price increases to reflect scarcity (as opposed to absolute, Malthusian scarcity), I’m guessing that at the very least you would support this approach? If so, what do you make of their analysis?

Thanks

An instance of the covert use of the ‘precautionary principle’ by AGW-advocates (Objection #4) was Ross Garnaut’s report to the Australian Government on climate-chang policy.

Prof. Garnaut, who like Stern is a distinguished economist but a strangely credulous policy analyst, reached some unconvincing conclusions by allowing poorly examined scientific ‘evidence’ (a paper whose projections were later disowned by the physical scientist who was the first author) to persuade him that uncertainty cut only one way (objection #6). He also cast the risks that he claimed justified costly (but futile) action into the distant and un-discountable future (objection#7).

A strain of objection I would add to your nine, is ‘argument from authority’. None of the public policy debate needs to be about the theory of climate change or the limits of classical probability any more than the debate about nuclear weapons has to engage with particle physics. It’s madness to believe we could ever base trillion-dollar global mitigation decisions on an appeal to fine distinctions about the theory of long-wave radiation. The justification for action must be visible on the face of ordinary evidence such as e.g. the historical temperature record (not ‘sufficiently alarming’ of course). Instead, governments offer patronizing ‘arguments from authorities’, who are all too easily co-opted to a fungible consensus, and a kind of luddite refusal, from there on, to examine any evidence that does not bear the imprimatur of the ‘authority’.