[sethjohn]

Some of the most interesting writing on this subject was the Copenhagen Consensus (www.copenhagenconsensus.com), and the critical responses to the Copenhagen Consensus.

The CC was a group of economists who got together and tried to figure out which world-problems were most economical to solve. I.e., if you had a fixed amount of money where would you spend it to do the most good. The list was something like: 1. AIDS prevention in Africa. 2. AIDS treatment in Africa. 3. Generalized healthcare in the 3rd world. etc etc. Last. Climate change

There are a lot of problems with the approach they took (considering only at the monetary value of lives not the "spiritual" value, assuming that charitable giving is a finite resource), but their approach of trying to do a reasonable cost-benefit analysis yields some very interesting results.

If I really thought the cost was equivalent to "counting beans" and the benefit was avoiding a situation where we could no longer find arable land, I would agree that we should act quickly and strongly to halt CO2 emissions. In fact, I suspect that allowing the third-world access to cheap (fossil fuel) energy will benefit them more than avoiding small changes in climate.

Of course, when it comes to American's perceived god-given right to drive around in monsterous SUVs...I come down firmly on the side of the environmentalists!

[joeguilmette]

If you take a look at how access to cheap fossil fuels has molded the post-WWII American landscape, I don't think there is a very strong argument to support the claim that such access to inexpensive oil is going to benefit anyone, especially countries just beginning get into urban development.

In the context of newly developing countries (i.e. third world countries that won't be third world countries in a few decades) the development of greentech is of paramount importance. The technologies and research behind preventing climate change (as theoretical as it all is) is very, very related to smart growth and green technology. By researching and implementing such tech, helping the reversal of our earth's possible climate change will (hopefully) be a useful side-effect.

What I'm trying to say, I think, is that by arguing that we should sit around and do nothing, we are setting ourselves up for disaster, and not just in the context of global warming. Sure, there is plenty of room to debate not only our contribution to the earth's warming, but even if we are warming at all.

There is not room to debate, however, whether or not we should pursue green fuels, smart growth, and to begin visualizing how our society is going to react to the end of the era of cheap oil.

These are some great Ted talks on the subject. The tragedy of suburbia. Hilarious, profane, and spot on. http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/121

John Doerr talks about the importance and profitability of green tech, the $6 trillion 'mother of all markets'. http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/128

[Elfan]

The Copenhagen Consensus looked only at a 5 year window. Since most of the likely costs of climate change take place farther in the future it is unsurprising that they found so little benefit for mitigation.

While economic analysis is very important in this case it is also very difficult. You can get any result you want be fiddling with the discount rate.

[sethjohn]

There was no '5 year window', but the discount rate was a subject of much debate. Actually, to get climate change out of last place, they had to apply a much smaller discount rate than for any other subject.

I would argue that the consequences in breakdown of African civil society due to a continuing AIDS epidemic will have a similarly long-term consequences as climate change...and thus a similar discount rate should apply to both.

[vitaminj]

This hypothetical "fixed amount" of money idea is a bit disingenuous in my opinion, especially since the methods for funding the proposed solutions are very different. The way governments are tackling climate change is primarily through regulation (ie, limiting carbon emissions) - the costs of which will eventually be passed on to the consumer by industry.

The fixed amount of money concept assumes that solving the other problems (eg. AIDS, 3rd world health, etc) are realistic opportunity costs for tackling climate change... but I don't think people would (in aggregate) willingly spend the money saved from climate change regulation on solving these other problems. They'd probably just buy more stuff for themselves.

The equivalent scenario would be if governments taxed people the same amount as the cost of regulation - and that is a tad unrealistic.

[ggrot]

There is alot of good data on the Copenhagen Consensus and climate change on wikipedia of all places: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_Consensus

The conference was run by Bjorn Lomborg who is an avid climate change skeptic and hence there may be some bias. Read Scientific American's critique of his work and you can judge for yourself: http://www.ma.utexas.edu/users/davis/375/reading/sciam.pdf

It was also only attended by economists, and the effects of the discount rate and formula they applied (only considering a the next 300 years) might were said by one of the attendees that "climate change was set up to fail".

[marcus]

The reason fighting climate change scored so low in the CC was not that the problem is not real, its that the damages are still pretty far down the road and that we don't have any really cost-effective ways to do it.

We need to keep spending on research in the area until we can find a solution that will make financial sense.

PS: look up the TED talk on the Copenhagen Consensus for a quick review of the issue