I have heard astonishingly low numbers for providing water and sewage.
Something like every American and European giving up coffee for a week.
Also one wonders how they valuated the costs. Did they use supposed ripple
effects when valuating the costs of reducing greenhouse gasses? Did they
take into account savings in the health care? Did they then offset this
with the revenue that the lost health care would have generated? Is the
'clean water and sewage' tab just for building it or maintaining it for 10
or twenty years? For educating the engineers to maintain it? For
relocating populations where clan water and sewage are impossible for
environmental or crowding factors? For the interest and banking fees to
finance either the clean water or clean air options? Did they just flip
through a pump parts and plumbing supply catalogue and add up the parts and
multiply by the number of wells needed? Did they add in graft and bribery
costs and the eventual cost over runs? How was the reduced greenhouse gas
projected? Did they predict massive job losses? Did they take into account
the demand for new technologies that would have been spawned from the basic
research possibly totally unrelated?
Without a good look at their methodology it's pointless to speculate. All I
can ask is who are these people and who's shouting them down? After that
you just take sides unless you really want to examine the evidence.
One recalls the budget projections of the US Congress during any tax debate
and realizes the futility of making any sort of politically charged
hypothetical cost projections.
Adam
Dean in '04
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-nanfa_at_aquaria.net On Behalf Of
SHasloue_at_kdhe.state.ks.us
Sent: Tuesday, August 26, 2003 2:11 PM
To: nanfa_at_aquaria.net
Subject: NANFA-- "Skeptical Environmentalist"
Wasn't this guy and his book the subject of a thread here quite a while
back?
Steve Haslouer
Topeka, KS
Panel: Danish Environmentalist Work 'Unscientific'
COPENHAGEN (Reuters) - A panel of independent Scandinavian scientists said
on Tuesday
that recent reports by a controversial Danish environmentalist were
unscientific and of
dubious value.
The Danish government asked the panel of five academics to evaluate reports
from an
independent environmental institute headed by Bjorn Lomborg, after a
prestigious Danish
scientific committee earlier this year accused the environmental maverick
of scientific
dishonesty -- a charge he dismissed.
The 38-year-old statistician, author of the controversial book "The
Skeptical
Environmentalist," enraged the scientific community by saying that the
dangers of
global warming (news - web sites) had been exaggerated and that trying to
slow it was a
waste of money.
"The panel must conclude that none of the reports represent scientific work
or methods
in the traditional scientific sense," the five scientists said in their
report.
In his book, Lomborg said the world's forests are barely declining, few
animals have
become extinct lately and rivers and oceans are becoming cleaner.
The chairman of Lomborg's Institute for Environmental Valuation, created by
the
center-right government in 2002, said the board took note of the panel's
evaluation,
while the Danish opposition said the institute should be closed.
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