Reply To: Wealth of Nations, and Economics of Abundance

[Duke Leto]

Uhhuh.

Punctuated Equilibrium in Climate, eh? Right.

The economic point is not that developing new technology wouldn’t be spiffy. It’s that betting worldwide planning on developing new technology is insane. You don’t know if the technologies you suggest will work or if they will fail, or if they will have some unforseen secondary effects.

Imagine it this way. Let’s say we’re playing draw poker and you have a 4 card flush but no pair, and I bet the size of the pot on my hand. You can fold or call, because the size of the bet is all the money you have. If you fold, you at least don’t lose everything now. If you call, you might double your stack, but only if you make your flush on the draw card, which is only about a 20% chance. Less counting the legitimate possibility that I’m holding a higher flush or better. So the only sane strategy is to fold. Now if we had a situation where the cost to find out if you get a flush were lower, say I had only bet one tenth the size of the pot, then calling would actually be sensible. Repeating the identical hand 100 times, you would 10 times your investment 2 out of 10 times.

Problem is that in this analogy, with the economic cost benefit analysis, you are calculating in an assumed ROI for research when you have no rational reason for thinking that there will be one for any given situation. You don’t know if it’s 5 to 1 we’ll hit something like FF or a runaraound against the photosynthetic ceiling, or 100 to 1. Or a million to 1. You also don’t know whether the threat of AGW is as bad as it is being represented. (The analogy to my hidden poker hand.) Maybe it is a bluff. Maybe it’s already so bad that we have to be prepared for an apocalyptic scenario and the resources thrown away on research would better be spent on canned food and ammunition. The point is that the lack of information on GW and future Energy resources strengthens the case for caution and conservatism in resource usage, NOT proceed as if nothing is wrong and hope that technology will bail us out.

I acknowledge this is an unfair attack on a strawman caricature of your argument, but I’m still in a bad mood about being a Stalinist.