What Sane Climate Discussion Looks Like

In #articles

One of the standard climate blogs I read is Judith Curry's blog Climate Etc... I find that the topics she brings up, and the points she adds to it, are always very engaging and even-handed, without the usual alarmism. For example, here is a summary of Bjorn Lomborg's Senate testimony, all points perfectly reasonable, as far as I can see.

From his estimates, "The cost of inaction by the end of the century is equivalent to an annual loss of GDP growth on the order of 0.02%....equivalent to losing one year’s growth, or a moderate, one year recession." while "policy action as opposed to inaction, also has costs, and will still incur a significant part of the climate damage." and incur (optimistically) a cost of "1.5% of GDP by the end of the century."

Further, he addresses certain specific policies, like

Solar and wind power was subsidized by $60 billion in 2012,
despite their paltry climate benefit of $1.4 billion.
Essentially, $58.6 billion were wasted. Depending on political
viewpoint, that money could have been used to get better
health care, more teachers, better roads, or lower taxes.
Moreover, forcing everyone to buy more expensive, less reliable
energy pushes higher costs throughout the economy, leaving less
for welfare.

I find, nearly universally, that people who espouse strong environmental policies never look at the benefits of not doing those policies - they focus entirely on one side of the economics.

Finally, I like the metaphor that he brought in

The metaphor here is the computer in the 1950s. We did
not obtain better computers by mass producing them to get
cheaper vacuum tubes. We did not provide heavy subsidies so
that every Westerner could have one in their home in 1960.
Nor did we tax alternatives like typewriters. The breakthroughs
were achieved by a dramatic ramping up of R&D, leading to
multiple innovations, which enabled companies like IBM and
Apple to eventually produce computers that consumers wanted to
buy.

This seems to me to be a rational way to discuss these topics.