Good question on global-warming costs

Iain Murray of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, writing to The Sunday Telegraph:

Sir, Christopher Booker is correct when he talks about global warming policy as an economic suicide note. Yale economist William Nordhaus recently estimated the full costs of unchecked global warming of 3C at about $22 trillion. That’s a lot of money, although it reflects all the assumptions of the global warming alarmists, which Mr Booker rightly questions.

Yet the costs of global warming policies are even greater. For instance, Lord Stern’s proposed approach would reduce those costs to $9 trillion, but at a cost of $26 trillion, for a total cost of $35 trillion. Al Gore’s policies, which Mr Obama seems to want to adopt, would reduce warming costs to $10 trillion, but at a policy cost of $34 trillion. Mr Gore’s policies would cost the world $44 trillion in total, twice the cost of unchecked global warming.

If global warming is indeed a disaster, what do we call the Gore-Obama policies?

Somehow, cost effectiveness seems never to enter into the alarmists' equations. Bjørn Lomborg, a Danish economist and no skeptic of global warming, wrote,

Global warming is seen everywhere as one of the most important issues. From the EU to the G8, leaders trip over one another to affirm their commitment to cutting CO2 to heal the world. What they do not often acknowledge - in part because it would lose them support - is that the solutions proffered are incredibly costly and will end up doing amazingly little good, even in a century's time. This is the truly inconvenient truth of the politics of global warming.

And he has the numbers to prove it.