Tom Friedman’s most recent column (Going Cheney on Climate) seeks to champion action on (alleged) global warming on the basis of the “precautionary principle.” The idea behind precautionary principle is basically insurance — you make the investment not on the certainty of something adverse occurring, at least not right away, but on the likelihood that it may occur, particularly as time passes.
Put aside for a moment that Friedman breathlessly mimics the same fascist, strong-arm, brown-shirt tactics of the “consensus” scientists who promise “catastrophic” consequences for global warming, such as those consequences usually reserved for really, really poorly acted but special effects jaw-dropping movies like 2012, The Day After Tomorrow, or Independence Day. Friedman has apparently learned nothing from ClimateGate except to double down.
Rather, consider that the precautionary principle’s most important aspect is economics.
That is, offer a population a life insurance policy for a few dollars a day and many or most will likely pay the cost. But offer them a policy like the TRILLION-DOLLAR price tags that such carbon-based treaties have had over the past decade and those same persons will wisely take their chances and use those funds for more pressing needs.
Friedman whiffs on that notion altogether. But it’s one that many smart people have attempted (while being vilified by the climate change scaremongers) to promote for many years.
Marlo Lewis wrote his great essay “Precautionary Foolishness” almost a decade ago.
Lewis actually uses the Precautionary principle against it’s proponents:
No one has demonstrated that the Kyoto Protocol [and other cap and trade schemes] won’t have harmful consequences. Therefore, we should oppose it.
Similarly, former Greenpeace activist Bjorn Lomborg frequently expresses his frustration that the cost of combating theoretical climate change is more deadly than the actual warming. Years ago he noted that for the price of the Kyoto treaty we could give every man, woman and child on the planet clean drinking water and proper sewage facilities.
But so long as we have Friedmans, Sontags, and other such well-intended liberal nincompoops with us, millions will continue to die for fear of what might be (cancer from DDT, climate change, FDA drug over-regulation) rather than what is (malaria, lack of energy, lack of drugs).
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P.S. — Another flaw with Friedman’s precautionary principle concept is that generally we adult consumers get to choose whether or not to buy insurance. In the case of climate change, however, our Nanny-state authoritarians on Capital Hill, or worse, unelected bureaucrats in the EPA force feed us insurance as though we were children. No thank you, Tom.