California and some Northeastern states have decided to force their residents to buy cars that average 43 miles-per-gallon within the next decade. Even if you applied this law to the entire world, the net effect would reduce projected warming by about 0.05 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100, an amount so minuscule as to be undetectable. Global temperatures vary more than that from day to day.
Suppose you are very serious about making a dent in carbon emissions and could replace about 10% of the world’s energy sources with non-CO2-emitting nuclear power by 2020 — roughly equivalent to halving U.S. emissions. Based on IPCC-like projections, the required 1,000 new nuclear power plants would slow the warming by about 0.2 ?176 degrees Fahrenheit per century. It’s a dent.
But what is the economic and human price, and what is it worth given the scientific uncertainty?
My experience as a missionary teacher in Africa opened my eyes to this simple fact: Without access to energy, life is brutal and short. The uncertain impacts of global warming far in the future must be weighed against disasters at our doorsteps today. Bjorn Lomborg’s Copenhagen Consensus 2004, a cost-benefit analysis of health issues by leading economists (including three Nobelists), calculated that spending on health issues such as micronutrients for children, HIV/AIDS and water purification has benefits 50 to 200 times those of attempting to marginally limit “global warming.”
Given the scientific uncertainty and our relative impotence regarding climate change, the moral imperative here seems clear to me.
Predictions
One Day We Will Video Everything in Our Public Lives
Well, maybe. Here’s a situation where a video record came in handy:
Ouch. The caption accompanying the video explains: This video was captured by a woman riding on her motorcycle. She was wearing a helmet camera (visit www.helmetcamera.com) just in case anything happened to her. Unfortunately it did. The black car locked it’s brakes and swerved due to slowing traffic. The person driving the black car later tried to blame the accident on the cyclist. Fortunetly the woman had everything on video and was able to prove she was not at fault.
Seems like it was a good idea for the motorcyclist to install the video camera. Why not put them in automobiles etc? That would probably be a good idea, but I don’t know if people will want to do it if it’s required, say, by insurance companies or legislation — anything that looks like a black box where only Big Brother gets to access the data will be a tough sell. But such concerns evaporate if individuals control their own tapes. As video cameras become cheaper, more people are going to think, Why not have one in my car/front porch/living room? You never know when it will be useful.
Iraq – How will we know if we’ve won?
War opponents keep asking this question. One answer is that we will have won when we depose the Islamofascist governments of Syria and Iran, and perhaps some other countries, and Iraq is stable, and we no longer face a threat from Islamic radicalism and terror attacks because the Islamists are crushed and demoralized. But that’s perhaps too expansive and too vague an answer.
I was watching a TV news discussion on FOX tonight about positive recent developments in Iraq, and I realized that there’s an easy way to determine when we have won. We will know we have won when the leadership of the Democratic Party starts claiming credit for the war.
How can you people not appreciate my genius?
Quick! Get Bertrand Russell, Linus Pauling and this guy and put them in a room together so they can solve the world’s problems.
There are reasons why people like this fellow are not running the country. “Everyone else is stupid” is not one of those reasons.
The interview is a good illustration of a life principle: most people, even very smart people, have limited competence in areas outside of their primary area of expertise (typically, what they do for a living). Usually, the farther afield they go, the less they know. Wiser people understand this. Some extremely smart, accomplished people do not. There is a lot of wisdom in William F. Buckley’s famous quip about how he would rather be governed by random people selected from the Boston telephone directory than by Harvard faculty members.
Quote of the Day
Others make the mistake of endlessly re-fighting the past six years – who let al-Qaida grow?; who “lost” Osama bin Laden?; who fouled up postwar Iraq? – instead of concentrating on the storm ahead.
Before 2001, the excuse for American complacence and in-fighting was naivete. But what will be the reason for the next successful strike against us by the jihadists?