So I’ve gotten some pushback from environmentalists on the proposition in my mag piece that we can afford, at real but modest cost, to limit greenhouse gas emissions. Oddly, it comes from two directions. On one side, there are those who insist that greening the economy is win-win: more jobs, more growth, as well as less carbon. On the other, those who insist that you can only be serious about protecting the planet if you admit that we have to give up on economic growth.
On the first: there is actually a fair bit of evidence that many energy-saving measures would also be cost-saving, even at current prices. Like most economists, I take these estimates with a grain of salt: if these actions really are cost-saving, why aren’t they being taken already? Isn’t that an indication that there are hidden costs? That said, in the real world people aren’t perfectly rational, so there may well be energy-saving measures with negative cost that aren’t being undertaken. What I would argue, however, is that given the size of the adjustment we need to make, these free-lunch savings won’t take us anywhere close to all the way.
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