Monday, October 8, 2007

One Answer Today: On Global Warming
What are your thoughts on global warming? Serious threat or hunk of bologna?

My take on this issue is easy:

(1) The environment is important

(2) A lot of our technology harms the environment to varying degrees

(3) As the environment gets harmed there will be negative consequences, either small or large. Even the small consequences are important (i.e. breathing dirty air in NYC sucks compared to breathing clean air in the South)

(4) Fixing or tweaking technology here and there and changing a few habits could make us harm the environment less

(5) Some technology tweaks are too expensive to be practical, but others are easier and could have a big effect on aggregate

(6) Most people would be willing to sacrifice small if they had specific guidelines and numbers showing that these sacrifices were making a big difference overall

(7) Toyota has shown that companies can make a significant profit by modifying technology to harm the environment less.

(8) A lot of added pollution will come from developing countries as they industrialize (China and India especially)

(9) If the US takes a leadership position on this issue, then we can better pressure other countries to follow (such as China and India). We'll also own the rights to a lot of technology that we'd invent that we can sell to these other countries and help our economy

It seems to me that there are three types of anti-doing anything about pollution people:

(1) Type A: They want to help the environment but don't want to recklessly spend a lot of money in avenues that won't have a positive effect. This is why the government needs environmental economists and experts to make any regulations intelligent ones.

(2) Type B: They have some sort of investment in keeping the status quo. For example if you own a factory and the government saddles you with so much environmental regulation that it can put you out of business. I can understand this too, which is why we need the government to be very cautious that it respects or tries to help versus hinders and destroys

(3) Type C: I think this is the minority but a % of the population is just now-oriented and lazy, doesn't really care about pollution or the next 50 years. This type I don't understand

And that's all!
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