Global Warming and Economics

I saw this in the commentaries at Althouse in a thread reagrding Gore and his Carbon Credit offset market. I thought it was worth repeating here:

It's hard to use an economic argument to create a crusade. Perhaps for that reason, Gore & Co. have tried to sell their cure-alls for global warming as a moral imperative. Thus, it's hardly surprising that they are now getting jabbed by their own rhetoric. As others note, there's nothing unusual about using market forces to solve an economic problem -- if you think of global warming as a problem in economics, then it's just a matter of structuring the market so that all relevant costs and benefits are taken into account, after which the market can arrive at an efficient allocation. But that frame of reference carries with it the downside of cost/benefit analysis; breezy "doom is coming" stuff won't do. Among other things, the manifest uncertainties in all of the projections of possible results many decades into the future make it difficult to frame a case for the kind of vast and hugely expensive present-day remedies Gore has proposed. By the same token, anything less than vast and radical remedies to slash the emission of heat-trapping gases have no impact, and thus no benefit to make them worth the (reduced) cost.Recasting the discussion as a moral issue is an effort to avoid all of that. It has the enormous political benefit of allowing one side to dismiss the other as evil ("deniers") who are probably in the pay of the devil. That's so much easier as a marketing technique. Unfortunately, a moral frame doesn't work even on its own terms -- no matter how you frame the discussion, there's no avoiding, or hiding, the huge costs and radical changes in lifestyles that the remedies Gore proposes would entail. The moral frame has the added consequence that it makes the proponents of those remedies (none of whom intends to give up the high-flying lifestyle) look and sound like hypocrites. In all, this sounds like just deserts.

No doubt!