I became enamored of the poetry of Stephen Crane back in junior high school. Gnomic, ironic, and all too brief, Crane’s free verse has a special appeal to the adolescent sensibility. Here’s a poem I memorized:
I saw a man pursuing the horizon;
Round and round they sped.
I was disturbed at this;
I accosted the man.
“It is futile,” I said,
“You can never — “
“You lie,” he cried,
And ran on.
As a teenager I sympathized with that small man pursuing the horizon. All honor was due to Sisyphus and his lesser brethren. Decades later I’m inclined to see the fellow as mad, a denier of fact, a fool.
I was reminded of this today when reading a provocative post on The Daily Dish, written by guest-blogger Jim Manzi. His essay (yes, the post is substantial enough to deserve that label) is entitled “The Socialism Implicit in the Social Cost of Carbon.” Manzi argues, convincingly I think, that calculating a social cost of burning carbon — toting up its heavy negative externalities — is a fool’s errand. It represents a blinkered approach to the goal of optimizing human welfare over the long term. There is every reason to believe we will misquantify the costs, and no reason to believe the costs of this one activity are more egregious than those of any other social activity pursued in our interconnected world. Man-made climate change is real, yet the seeds of Armageddon are hidden in a myriad of human actions (our pride and prejudice was clear before it went nuclear). Somehow the role of global bad guy, most horrible among horribles, has been dealt exclusively to carbon, forgiving other worthy applicants. We unthinkingly set about pursuing curtailment of fossil fuel burning, even when curtailment efforts may harm us more than the harm of inaction.
Manzi refers to our current fixation on carbon’s cost as chasing an endlessly receding horizon of zero risk.