Wednesday, December 11, 2002 :::
It's nice today, as it was yesterday; Chicago isn't supposed to be this warm in December. It's convenient that it is, though, because I read on the train last night the Lomborg essay on global warming not being worth the cost of fixing it. It's not a cheery piece of work; it seems to have less of "global warming's not so bad" about it than of "there's nothing we can do about it; we're doomed". (I'm simplifying here.) One other interesting item I culled from it, though, was that the current best guess appears to suggest that insofar as it would be worthwhile to curb emissions, it would be so only well into the century. By then the science will presumably be better, anyway; we have scientific justification for procrastinating! Which reminds me I have to do some Christmas shopping at some point. But the other bit about global warming is that, if large-scale stupid limitation of emissions is not cost effective, that doesn't necessarily mean that every bit of emmission being done now is cost-effective; a Pigouvian tax, ideally designed, doesn't care about cost of compliance, but if there's not much benefit to cutting carbon dioxide only a little bit, the ideal tax would be fairly low, and would only discourage those activities that are fairly gratuitous. Mind you, if the taxes collected and improvements in allocative efficiency are less than the associated frictional costs, it's not worth doing — and that that's the case seems quite possible based on what the article says.
::: posted by dWj at 11:28 AM
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