Drudge’s morning headline is that “$45 trillion needed to combat warming” — that’s the conclusion reached by some energy agency that wants to build thousands of nuclear power plants (this is the new goal of the radical environmentalist movements?).
Would this really be the best use of trillions and trillions of dollars in the world wanted to tackle some big problem? (As Bjorn Lomborg has argued many times before.)
This is a particularly important conversation now though since the Senate is still debatinig cap-and-trade legislation. Sounds like it won’t happen, but the U.S. Congress is contemplating massively costly legislation that really has no prospect of affecting the environment in any meaningful way.
I just finished reading a book called The Deniers, by Lawrence Solomon. It is really interesting in highlighting a sampling of reputable scientists who have questioned global warming orthodoxy (often paying a steep price for it). As he concludes, it certainly doesn’t mean that the global warming is just a hoax, but it does mean that the science is far from settled and we probably shouldn’t take extreme measures to combat a problem we aren’t sure exists. Makes sense to me.