How Not to Manage Risk

Today’s post is by Jon Anda. He is President of the Environmental Markets Network, an organization within Environmental Defense focused on legislation to create an efficient carbon market.

Bjorn Lomborg, who wrote the infamous “The Skeptical Environmentalist,” has a book coming out this fall called “Cool It.” He says we should spend minimal resources to fight global warming.

I wrote a guest post for Grist yesterday about why his approach is wrong. Here’s a key point from it:

Lomborg’s preference is to leave future generations more cash and less technology. Our grandchildren can easily go back to burning coal if climate turns out to be manageable. But how easily can they spend the extra cash if the Greenland ice sheet is irreversibly melting?

And here’s the whole post.

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3 Comments

  1. HealOurWaters
    Posted August 25, 2007 at 12:07 pm | Permalink

    Ha! What an interesting idea to think about. I think they’ll appreciate the cash!

    Meanwhile, did you know that the cost of cleaning up the Great Lakes would actually SAVE billions of dollars in the long-term? Using economic studies, we can show politicians that it actually makes financial sense to take action!

    Take a look at the site:
    http://www.healthylakes.org/

  2. greengranny
    Posted August 26, 2007 at 8:48 pm | Permalink

    I see that “commonsense101” is determined to fill the comment space of all these posts with the 10-year old debunked pseudo-science of Arthur B. Robinson and his religious-right Institute. This is the second post after which I have found the same identical comment.

    Readers new to the Robinson report (if any) who do not trust ED or Greengranny telling you this is myth dressed up as science, do a Google search and get the entire story from a wide variety of sources. That will be enlightening, because this kind of material was believed by our nation’s leaders (and still is by some) and is what held our country back for 10 years.

  3. Posted August 27, 2007 at 11:55 am | Permalink

    I deleted the duplicate posts from commonsense101. (Posting the same message seven times as comments to unrelated posts constitutes spam.) I left the copy in the Suggestion Box, in deference to free speech, though as you said it’s nonsense.