I read a lot of "best sentence of the day" posts. Au contraire. . .

The strongest argument against significant action is not from cost-benefit analysis in the narrow sense, but simply that we are not very good at producing international public goods. Especially when it comes to extended, intertemporal collective action problems directed against small probability events, with unclear periodic feedback, and dealing with the Chinese and the Indians, who feel they have the right to pollute as much as we did, and also with the not-nearly-as-cooperative-as-they-might-sound Europeans. . .

This argument sounds immoral and indeed perhaps is immoral -- "we're ruining things for others, yet if we tried to fix things we would ruin the fixing, so let's do nothing." Yet I do not think this issue should be disregarded. If I can't open up my computer, dissemble it, and then put it back together again, surely my repair plans should take that fact into account. . .

Remember that line from Dirty Harry?: "Do you feel lucky, kid?"

The deep error here comes from the false premise that the alternative to highly probable failure when trying to do "extended, intertemporal collective action problems directed against small probability events, with unclear periodic feedback" is doing nothing. In fact, it is not possible to do nothing. It's the empty set.

Authoritarians unable to grasp the idea that people do things when not forced or even authorized to do so are stonkered by climate change. There's no work for them, and they can't imagine work being done without them. We can feel sorry for them - this is a hard way to discover that their high opinions of themselves are unwarranted, and they are redundant - but there are limits to how far we can go to humor them. They have nothing to offer here and need to find something useful to contribute to society.