“Imagine a gigantic, colossal banquet. Hundreds of millions of people come to eat. They eat and drink to their hearts’ content, eating food that is better and more abundant than at the finest tables in ancient Athens, or Rome or even in the palaces of medieval Europe. Then one day a man arrives wearing a white dinner jacket.”
Not surprisingly the diners are in shock. Some begin to deny that this is their bill. Others deny that there even is a bill. Still others deny that they partook of the meal. One diner suggests the man is not really a waiter, but is only trying to get attention for himself or to raise money for his own projects. Finally the group concludes that if they simply ignore the waiter, he will go away.
This is where we stand today on the question of global warming. For the past 150 years, industrial civilization has been dining on the energy stored in fossil fuels and the bill has now come due. Yet we have sat around the dinner table denying that it is our bill, and doubting the credibility of the man who delivered it.
The great economist John Maynard Keynes famously summarized all of economic theory in a single phrase: “there is no such thing as a free lunch.” And he was right. We have experienced prosperity unmatched in human history. We have feasted to our hearts’ content. But the lunch was not free.
So it is not surprising that many of us are in denial. After all we didn’t know that it was a banquet — and we didn’t know that there would be a bill. But now we do know. The bill includes acid rain, and the ozone hole and the damaged produced by DDT. These are the environmental costs of living the way citizens of wealthy developed nations have lived since the industrial revolution. Now we either have to pay the price, change the way we do business, or both.
No wonder the merchants of doubt have been successful. They’ve permitted us to think we could ignore the waiter, while we haggled about the bill. The failure of the United States to act on global warming as well as the long delays between when the science was settled and when we acted on tobacco, acid rain and the ozone hole are prima facie empirical evidence that doubt-mongering works.”
Naomi Oreskes, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Sally 07.07.10 at 2:14 pm
well said
Richard 07.07.10 at 7:20 pm
Thank you Sally.
Mark Byron 07.07.10 at 9:17 pm
Wrong side of the economic aisle. It was Milton Friedman who popularized “there is no such thing as a free lunch” with sci-fi writer Robert Heinlein using it a decade earlier.
However, the phrase was around since the late 1800s, so Keynes might have said it, but he seemed not to popularize it.
The question remains what to do with those externalities.
Richard 07.07.10 at 9:33 pm
It’s a fair cop on the source of the free lunch adage.
But the central point remains. There will be a bill attached to global warming, and it will have to be paid. My worry is that it will fall disproportionately on the world’s poor who weren’t even at the banquet.
dh 07.07.10 at 9:58 pm
Milton Friedman? Man back in my college days I was a big fan of him and still are today. I did not know that Milton Friedman and Keynes both used the term. Talk about both being “on opposite sides of the fence” that sure is the case (with regard to Keynes vs. Friedman).