Everything You Heard About Climate Change Is Wrong
TODAY’S the lovely day we all find out how we’re going to fry in that latest report from the IPCC. You know, the scientific consensus on how climate change is doing damage to the planet and what it is that we might do about it. And what we all get told about what we ought to do about it is entirely wrong.
I mean all of that stuff that comes from The Guardian, Green Party, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and so on. You know the damn mantra. we must grow more of our own food, stop this horrible market based economy, plan to make things better, stop doing all this globalisation stuff.
It’s all absolutely and entirely wrong. And my proof is that the IPCC itself says that all those actions are wrong. It’s Chapter 10 here of the latest report.
The following initial conclusions emerge. First, markets matter. Impacts are transmitted across locations—with local, regional and global impacts– and across multiple sectors of the economy. For instance, landlocked countries are affected by sea level rise because their agricultural land increases in value as other countries face erosion and floods. Second, consumers and producers are often affected differently. The price increases induced by a reduction in production may leave producers better off while hurting consumers. Third, the distribution of the direct impacts can be very different than the distribution of the indirect effects. For instance, a loss of production may be advantageous to an individual company or country if the competition loses more. Fourth, a loss of productivity or productive assets in one sector leads to further losses in the rest of the economy. Fifth, markets offer options for adaptation, particularly possibilities for substitution. This changes the size, and sometimes the sign of the impact estimate.
Yep, markets matter. So we’d better not go around destroying those, had we?
Posted: 31st, March 2014 | In: Money, Reviews Comments (2) | TrackBack | Permalink
