This is a problem?
Environmental groups said the concession in the plans, aimed at cutting
CO2 emissions from new cars by 18 per cent over five years, represented
a victory for brutal economic arguments over environmental aspirations.
Quite excellent in fact, rather than a problem. The whole point of what we’re trying to do is to balance the needs and desires of those alive now against the needs and desires of those in the future who will have the consequences of those emissions.
We have a science that deals with these sorts of trade offs, looking for the socially optimal amount of whatever it is, balancing the effects across time and different groups of people. It’s called economics.
The whole thing, now we’ve seen the climate models, is an economic argument and you’d better damn well hope that, however brutal they may be, the economic arguments win out over the environmental aspirations.
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