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« Turning the climate tide | Main | Tomorrow's campus protest: you heard it here first » Tuesday, January 16, 2007The Stern retortIn another environmental story, the authors of the Stern Report have released a Postscript (follow the link here) to the report they prepared for the British government on the economic costs of global warming. In it they vigorously defend their conclusions against several separate leading objections that have surfaced since the report was made public. They also briefly address the criticism I've written about here -- that the report treats all future costs as being of the same value of present ones. The argument in the postscript bears a similarity to the one surprisingly advanced by the (mostly) libertarian economist Jane Galt, that discounting future costs is a matter of ethics, and one that requires serious questioning, even if it threatens our worldview and other of our political principles. The Stern excerpt is almost moving in its plea: Choosing a high rate of pure time preference to analyse a long-term issue that affects the global environment is to make a profound ethical choice with, in this case, irreversible effects on future generations. It is as though a grandparent is saying to a their [sic] grandchild, because you live your life 50 years after mine, I place far less value on your well-being.... Posted by Evan Hughes at 04:33 PM
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