 October 8, 2008
Dear Friend, As you read this week's WeGetIt.org Wednesday Bulletin, please be thinking of friends who would benefit from it, and then forward it to them. Thanks for your support! "Green jobs" are make-work
Global warming paranoia and fears about the financial crisis can produce some crazy thinking. One example is the claim that policies to reduce global warming will create "green jobs." That logic was brilliantly skewered more than 150 years ago by political economist Frederic Bastiat. In his famous essay, What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen, Bastiat described what has become known as "the broken window fallacy." A little boy accidentally breaks a shop window. Unfortunate? Not really. Now the shop owner will hire a glazier to replace the window, thus increasing employment and so the wealth of the nation! Bastiat wasn't impressed. Sure, the glazier had work, but the shop owner was now out what he’d spent to fix it. Without that broken window, the shop owner could have bought a new coat, employing a tailor. Or he could have invested in an enterprise, earning a profit and providing capital to employ some other worker. So the community as a whole would have been better off without the broken window. Time magazine's Bryan Walsh embraced the broken window fallacy when he boasted that reducing carbon dioxide emissions by building alternative energy systems would promote "green jobs at a time when unemployment is on the rise." Alternative energy systems should be pursued only if they make good economic sense by themselves, not because they might create new jobs. Otherwise, we might as well break a window. Top 8 myths of global warming dogma Quick! Your neighbor is a true believer in manmade, catastrophic global warming. He points to the overwhelming scientific consensus and the work of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and asks why you’re not urging your Congressman to back legislation to cut carbon dioxide emissions. What can you say? Where can you turn for quick information to help him reconsider? A new paper by the Science and Public Policy Institute by climate data analyst John McLean, Fallacies About Global Warming, would be a good start. It points out eight assumptions about global warming, all of which are false:
McLean provides convincing evidences against every one of those claims--and as a result the whole case for action to prevent global warming implodes. Another great source to debunk fears of manmade warming is this handbook. Would you accept 4 cents on the dollar? If so, you might think it makes sense to fight global warming instead of adapting to it. The cost-benefit ratio of policies to fight global warming by reducing carbon dioxide emissions is, indeed, roughly 25 to 1. Bjørn Lomborg emphasized this in a September 30 article in Times Online (the online version of the Times of London). The British government proposes spending about £100 billion ($175 billion) in the next two decades to fight global warming. The temperature payoff? About one 3,000th of a degree C reduction in a hundred years--or delaying full projected global warming for less than a week. Even if the entire world economy joined in at the same proportionate cost, spending not £100 billion but £5 trillion (almost $9 trillion), the temperature reduction would only be about one 600th of a degree. Lomborg and other economists estimate that every dollar spent to reduce global warming by adopting renewable energy sources instead of fossil fuels would yield about 4 cents of benefits. "To make a simple comparison," Lomborg writes, "the UN estimates that for about £40 billion ($70 billion) annually, we could solve all major basic problems in the world - we could give clean drinking water, sanitation, basic education and healthcare to every person in the world. But instead we are spending a fortune achieving almost nothing." For additional information on prioritizing spending to achieve the greatest good, see the Copenhagen Consensus Center’s 2008 report (www.copenhagenconsensus.com). Now, please forward this message to your pastor, other Christian leaders, and friends and urge them to sign the WeGetIt.org Declaration, too! The more people sign, the stronger the message our leaders will hear that Biblical principles and factual evidence, not media hype about speculative fears like global warming, should guide our care for the environment and the poor.Gratefully,
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