Did you read the article?
Do you know who Bjorn Lomberg is? Hint economist ]
And Bjorn has never really been a denialist â his main claim was that money would be better spend on serious problems of today, like malaria eradication (those Europeans! So unlike us Americans, who think we should NOT care about other people, esp the poor and ill, that itâs THEIR problem).
Anyway, my contention from my own experience (well before I even got onto alt energy), was that esp the rich nations could save a lot of money by mitigating AGW (& a host of other problems that would also be mitigated in the process), by becoming energy/resource efficient/conservative, which some figure is possible down to 75% reduction in energy consumption in America, without lowering productivity. See
natcap.org
RE economics, I have lots of problems with the field and with the way people make it out to be the mother that feeds us, when in fact it is Godâs good creation that feeds us. We practice âeconomy worship,â making the false god âMammonâ a much more serious problem in our society than âGaiaâ worship (if anyone really does worship Gaia); but Christians are so much up in arms about Gaia worship (pretty much a non-problem), but think nothing of Mammon worship (a really big problem).
Worship of Mammon:
Another way to look at it is, only humans have economies; animals do not, and yet they survive and thrive, or as Jesus put it:
Behold the birds of the air: they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them ⌠Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin.
Now having said that, the economy does help facilitate our material well-being. That is, it helps decide who the âresourcesâ (only those things from the environment we consider valuable) belong to, who works in producing them into products (division of labor), and how resources and products get exchanged. The market economy is the new boy on the block; for over 99% of human history/prehistory, itâs mainly been generalized reciprocity (AKA âprimitive communism,â as we have in our families), balanced reciprocity, and much later, redistribution, and at the very tail end, the market economy.
As environmental anthropologist Roy Rapport puts it, the economy is contingent and instrumental, while the ecological-biological system (environment) is fundamental. He considers todayâs subordination of the fundamental (environment) to the contingent and instrumental (the economy), to be a deep disorder of our time. See
jstor.org/pss/679842
In other words, we should be at least as concerned about the environment as we are about the economy (which is contingent upon the environment), if not more so. That is, if we value human life.