28 April 2019
The World's Climate Change Challenge
The World’s Climate Change Challenge
The articles by David Leonhardt (“The Economist’s Dilemma”)
and Brooke Jarvis (“Planetary Damages”) in the April 14 2019 Climate Issue of
the NYT Magazine combine to outline the direction that a solution to the
world’s climate change challenge must take.
Leonhardt shows how the economic concept of externality has
succeeded in burying the true cost of our use of fossil fuels, thereby creating
the impending disaster of a too warm climate on earth. This sinkhole of the progressive carbonization of the earth’s
atmosphere has allowed energy use to grow because one of its largest costs has
not been paid for either by oil or power companies or by retail energy
consumers.
Jarvis makes the connection to tort law She
shows how the case of climate change is similar to the derelictions that
sparked the Watergate controversy and the tobacco companies’ health hazard
settlement. It was the cover-up of the
DNC break-in and of the addictive properties of nicotine that got Nixon and the
tobacco companies into trouble. Sher
Edling, a firm representing plaintiffs in a ”nuisance climate lawsuit” in California, developed the
argument that carboniferous “emissions magnify the harm, but the tort is in the
deception,”
Of course, in the climate change case, both the energy
companies and consumers are at fault. The
market is the best tool for sorting out payment responsibility equitably through pricing. However, the climate effects of energy abuse
apparently must be addressed soon in
order to preserve our comfortable living style while we, or oven our children
are still alive.
