This is interesting.
Month: November 2007
Legal Theory & Its Children
P.S. to post below (and countless ones before that):
An example of the theoretical tire hitting the realistic road is discussed at Volokh Prompted by Neil Katyal’s “extensive review of Jack Goldsmith’s The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration
C-Span – God & Gold
Viewing note for the weekend: C-Span 2: Book-Tv at 4:45 p.m. e.s.t. Saturday will rerun Walter Russell Mead’s discussion of his God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World at the Council on Foreign Relations. His frame for giving context to Ango-American history is broad, illuminating the past as well as the present. This just-published book appears to include some of the arguments Lex recommended in an earlier Foreign Affairs article by Mead. Sunday afternoon, two panels on C-Span II will be devoted to Allen Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. Q&A on C-Span 1at 8:00 e.s.t. on Saturday will be John Bolton.
P.S.: Lex’s opinion below. Also, reviewed in The Economist; lengthy interview with Hewitt (audio also available there).
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Quote of the Day
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.