Environment

Cost-benefit analysis requires tough-minded decisions. It compels you (for example) to invest in children, with full lifetimes ahead of them, rather than in old people. It isn’t necessarily a discipline that works in all situations. Yet the Copenhagen Consensus makes two important points: You can get a very high economic return by reducing human suffering in simple, humble ways; and you can get the highest economic return of all – considering the minimal adjustment costs – by reducing global barriers to trade.

In other words, environmentalism is causing global warming. As ecoadvocates have won tighter clean-air regulations, their efforts have been rewarded with brighter days (a good thing), but also warmer temperatures.

When Sesame Street character Kermit the Frog croaked, “It’s not easy being green”, it was prophetic. Claiming you are green because you drive a Prius or because you recycle faithfully may win you points at the greener-than-thou cocktail parties, but do they really help the environment and humanity?

There is something odd about the ferocious amount of energy expended suppressing any dissent from orthodoxy on climate change. So, if their case is so good, why try so fervently to extinguish other points of view? There is a disturbingly religious zeal in the attempts to silence critics and portray them as the moral equivalent of holocaust deniers.

The recent success of the Conservative Party has owed little to quixotic environmentalism, and almost every Tory attempt to play the green card has been a disaster. While there is little public appetite for raising energy taxes or overhauling the British economy to deal with climate change, there is widespread support for boosting investment in green-friendly technologies, and the Tories are well-placed to advance this.

ICSC chairman Professor Tim Patterson said, “Instead of wasting billions restricting emissions of CO2, a vitally important gas on which all life depends, governments must concentrate on solving known environmental problems over which we have influence.”

Comments and reports about global warming are getting silly and even ridiculous. Al Gore says we have ten years left. We’re told cooling is due to warming. More rain and flooding and less rain and drought are both due to warming. More hurricanes are predicted while fewer occur.