Tyler Cowen: evaluation

Transcript context

…Both of us agree that it’s pretty unlikely that climate change is going to lead to human extinction or even probably a collapse of civilization. But we can imagine that, in a very similar world, where the climate responsiveness to greenhouse gases is, say, three or four or five times as large, such that what we’re doing now would lead to radical changes in the climate that that would probably lead to, if not human extinction, at least the collapse of civilization as we know it. If we were in such a severe, unfortunate world, do you think that countries would be able to coordinate to stop it? Or would we just be screwed? I think we’d be screwed. I think the greatest risk of climate change, even the less drastic scenarios, is our own response to it. In the London report, I think they estimate 3 to 4 percent of global GDP is lost through climate change, and they are not denialists. That strikes me as oddly low. If the global economy is growing at 4 percent a year, it just means you get to where you’re going a year later. That’s a lot of lost resources, but it, in that context, sounds entirely manageable, but I think that’s a misleading context. If you look at how we’ve responded to, say, Chinese competition or certain immigration problems, we way overrespond or we panic or we take the wrong measures in response. I believe the biggest costs of climate change will be the stupidity of our own responses to the real problems we have, but we’ll make them much worse because we’re not always good at dealing with emergencies. Do you think that, in the next hundred years, there’s any chance that we’ll mine asteroids and use their resources on it?…

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