Opportunity Costs of Goofball Warmening

First up today is Jonah Goldberg, who has a piece at Townhall.com entitled Planet Bull's Eye. I especially liked the sarcasm in this quote:

The year is 2109. Celebrations continue as mankind's heroic, century-long, quintillion-dollar effort to lower the global mean temperature by 1 degree has paid off: July 2109 is just as hot as July 2009. Few can contain their jubilation.

But even as the carbon-neutral champagne corks fly, the sky darkens. A projectile of a different kind is coming our way. An asteroid streaks across the skies, giving the media just enough time to spread the word. The New York Times, now beamed directly into subscribers' brains via digital-neural networks, fulfills ancient prophecy and warns that women and minorities will be hardest hit by the incoming object.

While Goldberg doesn't say it, the point is that spending huge sums of money to do...well...nothing insures that there won't be funds to invest in something else. It is the idea of "opportunity costs", the money one could have invested in something else if one hadn't invested in this. Its Bastiat's things unseen. It's the thing you didn't do, and what effect that thing might have had on society. For a real look at what we are forgoing by "investing" in cap-and-tax, try this article by Fiona Kobusingye also at Townhall.com today. Kobusingye raises the point that because of Goofball Warmening fears, the UN is telling Ugandans not to develop. But each day they don't have modern facilities like electricity, fresh running water and sewage disposal systems people die prematurely. If money that is being proposed to be stolen from ordinary tax payers were used to provide power plants, water and sewage treatment systems, and roads in Africa instead of going to greedy rich men, it would at least be doing something rather than nothing.

Goldberg again:

It makes you wonder. For all the rush and panic, the truth is, climate change -- if real -- is a very slow-moving catastrophe. Moreover, it happens to align with an ideological and political agenda the left has been pushing for generations: Unregulated economic growth is bad and must be controlled by experts; nature is our master, and we must be her servants. What a convenient truth for environmentalists.

Indeed.