From the Acton PowerBlog: A Change of Climate at The Economist by Jordan Ballor. This is an excellent response to the special issue of the Economist (Sep. 9) dealing with the environment and global warming (which, unfortunately, is not available for free online.) I wrote a brief post earlier pointing to the Economist article, but Jordan gives a much more complete response, and I agree almost word for word with everything he wrote.
At the request of Andy Crouch, who is among other things editorial director for The Christian Vision Project at Christianity Today, I have taken a look at the editorial from The Economist’s special issue from Sept. 9.
To recap, Andy asked me, “what are your thoughts about The Economist’s special report on climate change last week, in which they conclude that the risks of climate change, and the likely manageable cost of mitigation, warrant the world, and especially the US, taking prompt action?”
He continues, “This is, obviously, a magazine with impeccable liberal economic (not to mention journalistic) credentials, and one of the sponsors of the Copenhagen Consensus that raised questions about the wisdom of prioritizing climate change. I believe they would not have taken this editorial position five years ago. Do you think they are mistaken in doing so now? What do you see as the salient evidence they missed, if so?”
……….
I’m not as optimistic as the editorial about the size of the economic costs for these significant carbon taxes and cap-and-trade schemes. And having attended Tom Ackerman’s lecture, “Global Warming: Fact or Fiction,” I have seen first hand the rhetorical power of the infamous “hockey stick,” the legitimacy of which has come under increasing scrutiny. If the temperature record is only reliable up to 500 years, I’m not convinced that this is enough of a data set to responsibly make such huge predictions. So, in general, I don’t agree with, or at least remain agnostic about, The Economist’s conclusions on the economic viability or the environmental urgency of climate change.
I do think, however, and have written before, that there are plenty of compelling reasons other than the potential threat of climate change for petroleum-based economies to move toward renewable and sustainable sources of energy. In this, I might venture to guess that Andy and I are in broad agreement.
The disagreement may come in with respect to our views of the acceptable time horizon for what I’ve called the transcendence and obsolescence of petroleum (my timeline being somewhat more elastic than Andy’s). This presumably manifests itself in Andy’s emphasis on the necessity for government action while I am less inclined to resort to coercive legislation.
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