Portfolio: Global warming is good for us!
As I spent two hours navigating flooded roads en route to work this morning (at one point I actually saw a police car towing a rowboat), I started to wonder whether this was a harbinger of things to come; whether climate change would lead to more storms similar to this week’s Nor’easter, and flooded highways would be the least of our worries. Then I read Learning to Love Global Warming from the debut issue of Portfolio, and I stopped worrying. Turns out global warming is good for us. Climate change, rather than destroying civilization as we know it, will benefit many industries, including “depressed coastal resorts in northwestern Europe.” Fortunately, the article isn’t really pro-global warming. The shock-value headline leads to a fairly sober discussion of how economists view climate change, and provides a relatively reasonable conclusion, namely that as an insurance policy against a worst-case scenario, committing 1% of global output, or about $650 billion a year, to fighting global warming, “makes financial sense.” That sounds like a good start. As for me, I’ve got my eye on that police rowboat.
