Monday, March 29, 2010 11:33 AM
'Free Energy Policy From Climate Science'
By Margaret Kriz Hobson, NationalJournal.com
Bad boys of the environmental movement Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger are at it again.
In 2004, Nordhaus and Shellenberger gained notoriety for a white paper called "The Death of Environmentalism" that called on the greens to tear down and rebuild the environmental movement from scratch. Now the authors argue that the advocacy groups should forget about global warming as the rationale for transitioning the global economy toward less-polluting fuels.
In an essay on Yale Environment 360, Nordhaus and Shellenberger argue that "environmentalists and many scientists have overstated the certainty of climate disaster out of the belief that governments could not be motivated to act if they viewed the science as highly uncertain." The authors notes, however, that concerns about scientific inaccuracies found in the United Nations climate change studies could undercut public willingness to embrace greener forms of energy.
"Now is the time to free energy policy from climate science," they write. "In recent years, bipartisan agreement has grown on the need to decarbonize our energy supply through the expansion of renewables, nuclear power and natural gas, as well as increased funding of research and development of new energy technologies." They said that by detaching energy policy from climate science, "no one will much care" about the scientific faults found in the climate change studies.
Nordhaus and Shellenberger conclude that "so long as environmentalists continue to demand that climate science drive the transformation of the global energy economy, neither the science, nor efforts to address climate change, will be well served."
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