World Needs Balanced Solutions To Covid, Pollution

Tomas Philipson makes an interesting suggestion in his WSJ “What Climate Change Has in Common With Covid.” No brainer to him: “Private-sector innovation overcame the virus, now global warming needs an Operation Warp Speed.”

Well, Trump’s OWS gratefully mitigated but nothing man-made could “overcome” Covid or any other virus. Nor would any effort to improve the global environment gain significant ground if other countries like Russia, China, India continue to pollute with impunity. But, agreed, a private-sector push ala OWS might help environmentalist promises be realistic in the foreseeable future, provided they don’t bankrupt the nation in the process. Some more sage insights on how to manage environmental policy going forward by Mr. Philipson:

“Governments often go overboard when responding to new threats and policy makers’ response to Covid mirrored their continuing overreaction to global warming. In both cases they have failed to pursue mitigation strategies that minimize total harm to society. The initial policy response to Covid caused social and economic harms that, in the aggregate, proved worse than the disease itself. Likewise, discussions about the total harm from rising global temperatures often ignore the costs associated with preventing warming” (i.e., assuming that is even realistically possible). One, old-fashioned word says it all? Balance?

Davd Soul