Earth Day. Trees, photons and electrons are being sacrificed today to catalog the damages that may follow a 2 to 4 deg (C) warming over the century. Did the environmentalist lobby buy the biggest ad spread in history? If there is any discussion of the cost of fighting global warming it will likely take the form of "less than 2% of world income" or some such offhand attempt to downplay it.
Meanwhile, there are food riots across the world. No, this is not caused simply by the ethanol-for-fuel effort but that effort has strongly contributed.
My interest here is to observe just how selective the global warming coverage is. The mainstream media's coverage of the food riots often mentions (as it obviously should, summarized here) the contribution of alternative-fuel use bidding up the price of crops. It would be appropriate to see it mentioned equally in discussion of global warming. Do your own research. I have not seen much (actually none in the 5 pieces I picked to sample from a Google search on "global warming" and "earth day"). Bloggers, of course, have not been reticent (Robert Rapier, John Ray, Southchild have all been caustic).
We have an early read on the success, or not, of a tentative baby-step in the US effort to fight global warming. The step was typical ham-fisted government action. One evident result was higher food prices and probably famine. On this "Earth Day" the possible costs of doing nothing about global warming are dwelt upon constantly. The costs of doing something are not. These latter costs need far more attention from the public.
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