It seems impossible to have an honest conversation about global warming. I say this after diligently perusing the British government’s huge report released last week by Sir Nicholas Stern, former chief economist of the World Bank and now a high civil servant. The report is a masterpiece of misleading public relations. It foresees dire consequences if global warming isn’t curbed: a worldwide depression and flooding of many coastal cities. Meanwhile, the costs of minimizing these awful outcomes are small: only 1 percent of world economic output in 2050.
No sane person could fail to conclude that we should conquer global warming instantly, if not sooner. Who could disagree Well, me. Stem’s headlined conclusions are intellectual fictions. They’re essentially fabrications to justify an aggressive anti-global-warming agenda. The danger of that is that we’d end up with the worst of both worlds: a program that harms the economy without much cutting of greenhouse gases.
Let me throw some messy realities onto Stern’s tidy picture. In the global-warming debate, there’s a big gap between public rhetoric and public behavior. Greenhouse emissions continue to rise despite many earnest pledges to control them. Just last week, the United Nations reported that of the 41 countries it monitors (not including most developing nations), 34 had increased greenhouse emissions from 2000 to 2004. These include most countries committed to reducing emissions under the Kyoto Protocol.
Why is this In rich democracies, policies that might curb greenhouse gases require politicians and the public to act in exceptionally "enlightened" ways. They have to accept "pain" now for benefits that won’t materialize for decades, probably after they’re dead. And even if rich countries cut emissions, it won’t make much difference unless poor countries do likewise and so far, they’ve refused because that might jeopardize their economic growth and poverty-reduction efforts.
The notion that there’s only a modest tension between suppressing greenhouse gases and sustaining economic growth is highly dubious. Stern arrives at his trivial costs—that 1 percent of world GDP in 2050—by essentially assuming them. His estimates presume that, with proper policies, technological improvements will automatically reconcile declining emissions with adequate economic growth. This is a heroic leap. To check warming, Stern wants annual emissions 25 percent below current levels by 2050. The IEA projects that economic growth by 2050 would more than double emissions. At present, we can’t bridge that gap.
The other great distortion in Stern’s report involves global warming’s effects. No one knows what these might be, because we don’t know how much warming might occur, when, where, or how easily people might adapt. Stern’s horrific specter distills many of the most terrifying guesses, including some imagined for the 22nd century, and implies they’re imminent. The idea is to scare people while reassuring them that policies to avert calamity, if started now, would be fairly easy and inexpensive.
A. the remedies for a possible economic slowdown
B. the necessity for a sustainable economic growth
C. the costs of minimizing the effects of global warming
D. the dangers global warming may cause to the world
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Human relations have commanded people’s attention from early times. The ways of people have been recorded in innumerable myths, folktales, novels, poems, plays, and popular or philosophical essays. Although the full significance of a human relationship may not be directly evident, the complexity of feelings and actions that can be understood at a glance is surprisingly great. For this reason psychology holds a unique position among the sciences.
" Intuitive " knowledge may be remarkably penetrating and can significantly help us understand human behavior whereas in the physical sciences such common sense knowledge is relatively primitive. If we erased all knowledge of scientific physics from our world, not only would we not have cars and television sets, we might even find that the ordinary person was unable to cope with the fundamental mechanical problems of pulleys and levers. On the other hand, if we removed all knowledge of scientific psychology from our world, problems in interpersonal relations might easily be coped with and solved much as before. We would still " know " how to avoid doing something asked of us and how to get someone to agree with us: we would still " know " when someone was angry and when someone was pleased. One could even offer sensible explanations for the " whys " of much of the self’s behavior and feelings. In other words, the ordinary person has a great and profound understanding of the self and of other people which though unformulated or only vaguely conceived, enables one to interact with others in more or less adaptive ways. Kohler in referring to the lack of great discoveries in psychology as compared with physics, accounts for this by saying that " people were acquainted with practically all territories of mental life a long time before the founding of scientific psychology. "
Paradoxically, with all this natural, intuitive, commonsense capacity to grasp human relations, the science of human relations had been one of the last to develop. Different explanations of this paradox have been suggested. One is that science would destroy the vain and pleasing illusions people have about themselves; but we might ask why people have always loved to read pessimistic, debunking writings, from Ecclesiastes to Freud. It has also been proposed that just because we know so much about people intuitively, there has been less incentive for studying them scientifically: why should one develop a theory, carry out systematic observations, or make predictions about the obvious In any case, the field of human relations, with its vast literary documentation but meager scientific treatment, is in great contrast to the field of physics in which there are relatively few nonscientific books.
A. find a satisfactory explanation to the human relations in their books
B. show the growing tendency to ignore scientific explanations of human relations
C. challenge the first analysis on the underdevelopment of the science of human relations
D. prove the unwillingness of people to abandon the pleasing fantasy in their mind
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