Climate change is a problem, and it definitely is one that we need to tackle over this century. But to say that this is the first and foremost thing that we need to tackle, as Tim Flannery said in a Financial Times interview a week ago, that this is the one thing we need to focus on in the next 10 years - that is simply ridiculous. We would be doing something that will help people very little - and only in a hundred years from now - at a very high cost. Meanwhile, we would be neglecting the fact that we could do massive amounts of good for less money for a lot of the people living right now - and in the process helping their descendents much more.Read the whole thing here.
To clarify: the title is excerpted from Act 1 of Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost. The full quote goes: "Light, seeking light, doth light of light beguile; So ere you find where light in darkness lies, Your light grows dark by losing of your eyes." It's a warning against spending too much of your life in scholarly pursuits.
Day By Day
Saturday, July 07, 2007
What's the Rush?
Bjorn Lonborg responds to those who insist that global warming is the greatest threat facing us today. He writes: