Skip to main content

2 Sides of Climate Change Debate

I watched former VP Al Gore's testimony before Congress earlier this week on CSPAN today regarding climate change. Given how partisan the debate is, it's amazing that we actually get anything done in Washington D.C.

I saw the movie An Inconvenient Truth, so Al Gore's testimony wasn't that new. I thought it was even more interesting to watch the economist that the Republicans called to testify before Congress. Bjorn Lomborg, a professor at the Copenhagen Business School, provided his testimony before Congress shortly after Al Gore did. He offers a very different perspective on the climate change challenge. He wrote a book called The Skeptical Economist. Basically, he was suggesting that there are higher return investments than dealing with climate change. For example, controlling HIV/AIDS or malaria would result in far more human benefit. He offered some interesting perspective on solutions like the Kyoto Protocol, taxing carbon emissions, cap-and-trade solutions, etc. He was suggesting that these have all failed and that the gap between where technology is and where it needs to be to be economically viable is way too far off. So our best investment is in research and development.

It's a pretty lively testimony. The first question from Congressman Gordon is based on completely incorrect data. Then he gets attacked by one of the Democratic Reps, Jay Ensley, who brings up the moral debate, disses Denmark, and then later goes on to talk about some small islands that will go under water if Greenland melts. That guy was pretty scary. The Polo t-shirt and jeans threw me off at first, but Lomborg handled himself pretty well.

The media has definitely latched on to the whole climate change issue and seem to argue that we must do something immediately or there will be some catastrophe in 50 years. You rarely see the other side of the debate. Interesting to see this guy.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Fortunate 400

So there's rich, and then there's super rich. I recently read an article in the WSJ about the top 400 taxpayers based on income. Pretty incredible statistics. Those top 400, or what they call the "Fortunate 400", pulled in $85.6 billion in income in 2005. That's over $200 million each ... in one year! Here's a quick graphic to drive that home: Very impressive. There's all the obvious jaw-dropping statistics to go with that. For instance, to make the cut to be in the 400 you had to pull in at least $100 million. With an average of $200 million, that means there's people pulling in well over that number. Obviously, quite crazy numbers, and generally speaking not necessarily anything to be concerned about. I'm all for capitalism. But one of the more disheartening statistics was that adjusting for inflation, the minimum income to make the cutoff into the Fortunate 400 has nearly tripled since 1992. That's probably not a good sign as I imagine that...

Nine Prescriptions for Building the Duke Entrepreneurial Community

I think Duke can have one of the strongest entrepreneurial communities in the world. Are we there yet? Well, not yet. But there's a tremendous amount of momentum that I saw build in just the past two years while I was getting my MBA at Duke. While leading Duke's 10th annual business plan competition, the Duke Start-Up Challenge (DSC) , last year, I witnessed a near doubling of participation on campus in just a single year. The interest on the ground was clearly there and building rapidly. But now that I'm an alum, I'm looking back and wondering ... how do we rev-up the Duke entrepreneurial community even more? I read a great article by Daniel Isenberg, a professor of management at Babson, called " How to Start an Entrepreneurial Revolution " in the June edition of the Harvard Business Review. Isenberg outlines nine prescriptions for governments that want to create entrepreneurship ecosystems in their countries. Although he was focused on governments an...

A Possible Solution to the Mortgage Crisis

Came across this one on Mankiw's blog as well (... someone has been stealing my WSJ's each morning before I can pick them up outside). Martin Feldstein, a professor at Harvard and chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors for Reagan, had an opinion article in the WSJ yesterday that outlined a possible solution to the mortgage crisis. Criteria for the plan is: don't shift burden to taxpayers, don't force banks to eat all the losses, and create an incentive for homeowners to stay in their homes. The idea is that the US government would provide loans to homeowners up to 20% of their mortgage amount, with a 15 year pay-back period and adjustable interest rate based on the two-year treasury note. The whole thing would be funded by selling more two-year treasury notes. This would obviously not stop anyone from walking away from their home if they have negative equity, but it might prompt those that are worried about that scenario happening to them in the future to sti...