The debate over global warming appears to have passed a tipping point. We can debate just when it happened. But it was probably sometime before Al Gore's film won the Academy Award. From now on, we can expect to be bombarded with almost daily news articles about its long-term effects on those living in low-lying areas along coastlines, those attempting to grow crops in rapidly shifting climates, those living along the equator as opposed to temperate climes (being addressed by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as this article hits the Internet), and even those getting ready to drill for oil in open water that the polar ice caps still cover. The list goes on and on. Within the past few days, Thomas Friedman, the journalist and best-selling author of The World Is Flat, intimated in an interview with Tim Russert that he is particularly excited about what may happen when the American business community and its ideas are unleashed on the problem. We may get the gist of this in an upcoming article of his that, according to him, will be titled, "Green Is the New Red, White, and Blue."
Whether or not you believe that humans are causing global warming or that it is occurring at all is beside the point. The same was true on a much smaller and less lethal scale with Y2K. But unlike Y2K, there is no date certain by which we will know whether we have won or whether we were even fighting the right battle. There is going to be a lot of money made or lost for a long time on the effort to combat global warming. It raises the question, of course, of whether the free market has the patience for investments that may not pay out for many years. The end value may be huge (even infinite?), but the discounted value of it may be modest.
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