Tuesday, December 8, 2009

If It Warms Up, Who's Going to Pay?


This is a useful perspective on the challenges for the Copenhagen conference (from the Wall Street Journal ):
Poorer countries insist there will be no environmental agreement unless wealthy countries help them adapt to the possible effects of global warming. Samuel Fankhauser offers a blueprint for cooperation.  (Continue to the article...)

3 comments:

  1. Krugman's argument that cutting greenhouse emissions is somethiang that Friedman has written on extensively. But his idea that the current recession provides an opportunity because labor and amterials may be cheap is interesting

    ReplyDelete
  2. This is an interesting topic, both in terms of the socioeconomic issues and the science. In the 4 Degrees Symposium John Schellnhuber showed very clearly that in order to meet our climate goals we'll have to rely on "annex 2" countries' changed trajectories in development. He made the offhand, but very provocative comment that this will essentially reverse the colonial flows of cash from south to north that built many of the European empires. There is a video of his talk at: http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/4degrees/programme.php

    ReplyDelete
  3. There is a lot of discussion of near and long term benefits. I suggest that there can no other way. The analogy is to biological evolution, where new structures and functions do not appear de novo but through a series of stages, each of which is fully compatible if not an improvement on the former stage.

    ReplyDelete