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Harvard economist Edward Glaeser, writing in the Boston Globe, says “Smart environmentalism has three key elements. First, policies should be targeted toward the biggest environmental threat: global warming. Second, our resources and political capital are limited. This means we must weigh the benefits of each intervention against its costs. Third, we must anticipate unintended consequences, where being green in one place leads to decidedly non green outcomes someplace else.”
Unfortunately he stops there. Like today’s generation of best-selling atheists, who repeat David Hume and Bertrand Russell without noticing that their arguments persuaded few, Glaeser repeats the standard economic prescription without acknowledging its political difficulty. Everyone hates traffic congestion too, and it’s been well known for years that the way to cure traffic congestion is to tax it by charging time-of-day tolls, but it never gets done.
