About the best commentary I have ever read on the subject.

Too bad idiots like Al Gore wouldn't have the faintest idea what

he is talking about.

It always amuses me that the wealthier and more urban of the

commentators on global warning have no knowledge of any of this.

Thank You

Eric Freischlag

Man caused global warming is an even bigger scam than Six Sigma.  There is not a single piece of actual evidence to support the theory.

If current atmospheric CO2 levels were halved, life wwould end on this planet.  Increasing CO2 increases plant growth.  It has only beneficial effects.

I used to work in a support role for R&D work at the University of California, Los Alamos National Labs, and saw some bad practices on modeling assumptions, incorrect use of statistics and even a lack of knowledge of good statistical tools, unwillingness to look at other causes / factors such as the the increase in solar sun flux and overall sunspot history (which has a much higher statistical correlation coefficient than greenhouse gases).

Catherine

The point of many of the actions that you mention--cap-and-trade, energy taxes, etc.--is to internalize costs that are currently externalized and picked up by society rather second-hand through increased taxes, higher health-care costs, and so on. More traditionally, ISO 14001 grew out of the need to prevent such externalized costs, just as mercury emission regulations grew out of the need to prevent externalization of costs. "Ozone action days" and EPA Super Fund sites are all externalized costs that rightly belonged within the costs of doing business. If the history of the Quality profession teaches us anything, it's that preventing problems is cheaper than fixing them. Unfortunately, it's even cheaper for individual companies to externalize costs, even when the long-run, externalized costs are higher.

There is ample evidence that the release of greenhouse gasses is increasing mean surface temperatures as well as increasing the variability of weather events.There is good reason to believe that these increases will have negative impacts on commerce--i.e. that there are costs that are currently being externalized. There is significant debate over the magnitude of those externalized costs. You can check out the peer-reviewed literature yourself; a nice place to find some five thousand references, conveniently organized into pro-AGW, neutral and skeptic papers, is http://www.skepticalscience.com/climate_science_history.php. No doubt you can find other sources, as well.

Let us not forget, when discussing renewable energy sources, that it's not merely a question of "renewable energy vs. greenhouse gasses," as you imply. The net reduction in emissions over life is a nice benefit, but we have another big problem: carbon-based fuels are steadily being depleted, even as our consumption is growing. Most estimates are that oil will be sufficiently depleted to be uneconomical as a fuel between 2020 and 2050. Gas will follow between 2030 and about 2075. Coal will follow between about 2050 and 2150. The uncertainties in these estimates stem mainly from uncertainties in the projected consumption; the available resources and economic reserves are generally well-known.

Personally, I like our high-energy, high-tech civilization; I'd rather not wait until the last minute to try solve the problems of having adequate energy sources to sustain--and even improve--our lifestyle. Internalizing costs is the economist's way of doing this fairly and equitably.

Dear Mr. Levinson,

Thank you for your article. Energy and environmental policy are within the responsibility of every enterprise and should be clearly defined by them.

In order to help define them I'd like to clarify several presumptions in your article:

-Social Responsibility is achieved by cost-effectiveness.

Cost-effective solutions are definitely not social by themselves, they just might  provide money for it. To me there is much more to social responsibility, to start from, to protect the natural resources of water, fertile soil and fishing grounds to enable us to live from. According, renewable energy based on growing fuel would be as well a waste of the essential resources.

-Renewable Energies are cost-ineffective

This seems to be an ongoing standard, but it isn´t correct, if you take all costs into account.

Resources of fossil fuel are each time  more far off and more difficult to explore. That includes more waste in exploring them, more waste in transporting them, and more waste and endangering of the natural resources mentioned above. Take the destruction of soil and fishing grounds of the proper working exploitation and transportation into account (->food supply) and add the cost of ongoing havaries of oil platforms, pipelines and tank ships.

Part of this pays the consumer not on the energy bill, but in the supermarket and on tax. And there is much more to that. We need the access to the exploitation and the transportation ways. Name the prize of the gulf wars and add part of it to the price of each gallon of raw oil gathered from there.

-People die on poverty

You don´t die on poverty. You die on lack of proper food and water, on lack of treatment of sicknesses (caused by the first mentioned), on fights for these - and, few but growing, on "natural" catastrophes.

-societal costs of global warming, such as rising sea levels and desertification, ….. threaten low-level inhabited islands,…. relocate the people and buy them new homes?

The actual stated greenhouse effects are not just growing deserts and the sea levels rising some inches. We state worldwide changing climates, with more destructive storms and hurricanes, changing winds, causing inundations in Asia and dryness and hunger in East Africa….

To stay just with cost-effectiveness, how much is the reconstruction of the destroyed, how much the loss on food-supply?

Future scenarios are of cause highly speculative and vary especially in timeframes.

Quite common is at least, that we don´t talk about relocation of some people inhabiting low-level islands - we got to face moving about a third of human population, all sea harbors and attached  industry, some of the major cities of the world. We talk about losing an enormous part of fertile soil and carbon dioxide absorbing vegetation. We talk about major climate changes with destructive impact on fertility of land and sea, on sweetwater supply, and inhabitable areas.

Unfortunately you may be right, that we can´t stop this process any more, but we can slow it down to make it a bit more manageable. Not going for renewable energy would not only be social irresponsible, muda (waste) in terms of cost-effectiveness and resources, it would be muri (overburden, unreasonableness or absurdity ).

Regards,

Gunther Gorny