Technology Review recently had an editorial addressed to President Obama (Dear Mr. President: Time to Deal with Climate Change) asking him to make global warming his top priority. They acknowledge: "It means immediate spending and economic sacrifice by present-day voters in order to achieve benefits that will be realized decades from now."
I don't understand the morality of "immediate spending and economic sacrifice by present-day voters in order to achieve benefits that will be realized decades from now." I wrote to Jason Pontin at Technology Review (who seems like a nice fellow) and told him that I thought that the people of 2050 and 2100 will be better off than the people of the present "under any realistic scenario of global warming." He questioned whether this would indeed be the case. So I put some potential "quality of life" indicators in a table, with my estimates for their values circa 2012, and my estimates for what they would be in 2050 and 2100.
I'd be happy for him or any other Technology Review (TR) author of that letter to present their estimates. I'd also be happy for him, them, or anyone else to provide some potential other parameters that should be on the list.
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