“GAME OVER” - The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future - page 88

in search of clues about what is happening with the pine beetle. Yet
by their own admission, their knowledge about how climate change
af ects this one simple and much studied organism—and how those
consequences play out for trees, forests, and the people and livelihoods
that depend on them—is still maddeningly incomplete. Expand this
to the thousands of other dynamics that govern life on earth, and you
start to appreciate how dii cult it is to anticipate precisely what climate
change might or might not do to the planet. It is impossible, however,
to avoid the conclusion that it could all turn out very badly.

m m m

All of this haze surrounding the consequences of climate change makes
evaluating the impacts of various energy paths immensely dii cult.
Some people look at the situation and conclude that all new fossil-fuel
developments should be stopped. h ey are implicitly judging the result-
ing climate damages to be ini nitely bad. h e logic is simple: burning
fossil fuels is raising the risk of deeply dangerous climate change, which
naturally makes new development intolerable.
In practice, though, few actually believe that. Consider what might
seem like a completely dif erent mat er. More ot en than not, when an
American turns on her lights, there's a coal- or gas-i red power plant
somewhere that's producing the electricity and, in the process, adding
to climate change. But no one is calling for Washington to issue a ban on
turning on lights; the benei ts of having light outweigh the damages. h e
same sort of trade-of exists when it comes to developing new fossil-fuel
sources. Sometimes the good consequences of developing new fossil fuels
will be enough to outweigh the bad ones; other times they won't be.
On the other end of the spectrum are people who insist on more
research into climate risks before we judge the consequences of cer-
tain developments for climate change, and do anything to confront the
climate problem. Once we know what the real dangers are, they say,
we can assess costs and benei ts and take whatever action is needed.
By suggesting that we shouldn't account for emissions in our current
decisions, they are implicitly treating the damages from greenhouse gas
emissions as zero.