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Lawrence Krauss On the Pope's Encyclical: Not Even Close?
Lasrick writes: Lawrence Krauss muses on the hoopla surrounding Pope Francis' encyclical on climate change, and finds the document lacking: 'It is ironic that while the scientific community has long tried to raise warning signals and induce action to address human-induced climate change, an encyclical from the pope on this subject is being taken by many as an ultimate call to action on this urgent issue.'
That's not true, the Pope goes there and totally disagrees with Krauss, Francis strongly condemns birth control and abortion. I agree I don't think that's workable, though I know what Francis would say: people should be fucking a lot less and only for procreation. This doesn't actually work in our culture, but as far as he's concerned the culture is the problem.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
The tricky bit is that greenhouse gas emissions are a classic negative externality(arguably even more so than pollution generally, which more often stays comparatively close to the release site, rather than having minimial proximate effect but worldwide cumulative effect).
Negative externalities are not things that people tend to just stand up and volunteer to fix because they are nice guys like that, never mind getting all of them to do so, rather than some doing so and the rest taking advantage of the newly cheaper coal.
Pigovian taxation has the advantage of letting the private sector work out the details of the technology; but unless you internalize the externality you can expect to wait a long, long, time for anything to happen voluntarily.
Here are the folks who advise the Pope on science: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Some names you may recognize: Edward Witten, Stephen Hawking, Francis Collins, Mario Molina, Maxine Singer, etc.