Another aspect of our psychology's 'moral hazard' might play out like this:
After rosy claims of such solutions being shown not very practical or with limited effect but insurmountable obstacles, one after another, years pass by. The public as well as people who have worked on them become totally wary of such solutions and give up. A small number of proposals, new or old that may actually work in a broad cost-benefit sense as partial contributors, are also ignored. The climate problem continues to worsen, until a threshold in the public's perception and in the political system is reached. Because the workable solutions take a long time to ramp up, a small number of countries/entities decided to use drastic 'cheap and quick' counter measures anyway, .... Regards! -Ning Zeng On Sep 19, 4:37 pm, "Robert Socolow" <soco...@princeton.edu> wrote: > Let me give this a try. Moral hazard, yes, is a kind of market failture, but > one rooted in psychology. We desperately want there to be low-cost solutions > to climate change. So, each time a "solution" arrives that looks like it is > low cost, we embrace it and are not adequately critical. That's just how > we're wired. Moral hazard captures the tendency to self-deception. If we > assessed low-cost proposals with appropriate skepticism, there would be no > problem. The arrrival of each new "solutions: should lower our level of > effort on what we are already getting ready to do, but we allow these > "solutions" to distract us -- we systematically overvalue them -- and thus > we lower our level of effort more than we should. We know thjis is one of > our own weaknesses, and we are trying to warn ourselves. > > We need cognitive psychologists here to frame these issues better than I > have. > > Rob > > _____ > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To post to this group, send email to geoengineer...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering?hl=en.
