“If you think like a cold-blooded economist instead of a warm-hearted humanist, Gore’s reasoning doesn’t track. It’s not that we don’t know how to stop polluting the atmosphere. We don’t want to stop, or aren’t willing to pay the price.”
That’s from Freakonomics authors Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, in their new book, SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance.
I read the quote in Elizabeth Kolbert’s book review in The New Yorker. I agree with EK that Steven and Stephen are doing the world a disservice by suggesting that we are incapable of mitigating climate change without geoengineering (pumping volcanic amounts of sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight away from our warming planet). And I think the world needs warm-hearted humanists more than it needs cold-blooded economists.
In the Freaks’ defense, however, Dubner’s blog post on the controversy surrounding their book’s take on climate change is clear and mature and absolutely worth reading.
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