When I was young I was quite the environmentalist, but I grew out of it around age 7 or so(~1992, when it was still fairly new). Didn’t have much of a rational basis for it(truth be told, the moment I remember was reading a book by a lady named Harms, and thinking that didn’t make any sense for someone named Harms to be doing something I so strongly associated with helping, so I drifted off to other things to geek out about instead—yes, I was a strange kid). I sort of dropped AGW with all the other baggage of that era for many years.
Didn’t think about it much until I got into political debate again around 2001. I was a hard-line libertarian by then, and hung out in a pretty sarcastic circle, so seeing AGW as a big-government plot was easy. Defaulted to that for a little while, but then I took a spectroscopy class in university and a simple look at the absorption spectrum of CO2 makes it clear that it is, in fact, a greenhouse gas, so the theory must have some truth.
It was still a second-tier issue for a long time—Iraq took up most of my political debate time for years. The next moment I remember was reading Bjorn Lomborg in about 2005, and thinking that there was finally someone who I thought really made sense on the topic. AGW is real, but it’s not a catastrophe waiting to happen—if it was, it’d have happened at some point in our planet’s history, so negative feedback has to exist. It’ll raise temperatures, which will have both positive and negative effects, and while the cost of the negatives outweighs the benefits of the positives, the present value of the sum is far too small to be worth worrying about.
My views largely haven’t changed since then. AGW is scientifically real(though somewhat overblown, and I don’t have a lively confidence in the accuracy of their pretty bad models), but worrying about it is economically silly. And the economic studies seem to back me up—the ones that say it’s bad use ridiculously low discount rates, which is about the only number that matters over that time scale. I favour some mild mitigation efforts—a revenue-neutral carbon tax for example, since it has no real societal cost—and research into how to geoengineer for cooler temperatures if we hit the black swan and have to worry about a catastrophe, but put the real money into bigger problems.
When I was young I was quite the environmentalist, but I grew out of it around age 7 or so(~1992, when it was still fairly new). Didn’t have much of a rational basis for it(truth be told, the moment I remember was reading a book by a lady named Harms, and thinking that didn’t make any sense for someone named Harms to be doing something I so strongly associated with helping, so I drifted off to other things to geek out about instead—yes, I was a strange kid). I sort of dropped AGW with all the other baggage of that era for many years.
Didn’t think about it much until I got into political debate again around 2001. I was a hard-line libertarian by then, and hung out in a pretty sarcastic circle, so seeing AGW as a big-government plot was easy. Defaulted to that for a little while, but then I took a spectroscopy class in university and a simple look at the absorption spectrum of CO2 makes it clear that it is, in fact, a greenhouse gas, so the theory must have some truth.
It was still a second-tier issue for a long time—Iraq took up most of my political debate time for years. The next moment I remember was reading Bjorn Lomborg in about 2005, and thinking that there was finally someone who I thought really made sense on the topic. AGW is real, but it’s not a catastrophe waiting to happen—if it was, it’d have happened at some point in our planet’s history, so negative feedback has to exist. It’ll raise temperatures, which will have both positive and negative effects, and while the cost of the negatives outweighs the benefits of the positives, the present value of the sum is far too small to be worth worrying about.
My views largely haven’t changed since then. AGW is scientifically real(though somewhat overblown, and I don’t have a lively confidence in the accuracy of their pretty bad models), but worrying about it is economically silly. And the economic studies seem to back me up—the ones that say it’s bad use ridiculously low discount rates, which is about the only number that matters over that time scale. I favour some mild mitigation efforts—a revenue-neutral carbon tax for example, since it has no real societal cost—and research into how to geoengineer for cooler temperatures if we hit the black swan and have to worry about a catastrophe, but put the real money into bigger problems.