I've never been convinced by the "it'll ruin our economy" arguments. Why? How could you possibly know this? Are you ignoring the potential jobs green legislation could create in the area of green technology?
Personally, I see plenty of reason to proceed with green initiatives regardless of the global climate change issue. Do I want cleaner air in cities? Yes. Legislation to reduce car emissions has already made a very noticeable impact in my own city in just a decade. Do we really want to have air like they have in China?
The same can be true of power generation. We need more power, and nuclear waste is dangerous * independently* of climate change. Coal and gas have negative impact on our air quality. Thus we are left again with green technologies for now.
I don't know if all the proposed changes intended to help climate change have other benefits like the ones I described. That would be an interesting question to have answered.
This is economics 101. If there were an alternative that were more profitable and green, don't you think somebody would already be doing it out of greed if not altruism?
No, the fact that those greedy capitalists must be forced to do it pretty much shows that it's losing money, relative whatever else they might do with that money.
And what might those alternatives be? Why, investing in new businesses to create jobs, improving infrastructure, etc.
Really, the idea that the government is so much wiser about business and economics than the corporations, so the laws will drag us kicking and screaming into prosperity, are just absurd. The government is incompetent at managing the entire system. And Friedrich Hayek's Nobel-Prize winning work proved that this is necessarily so -- it's absolutely impossible for any centralized authority to integrate all of the distributed data about needs, priorities, resource availability, etc. Only the distributed cloud of the market can do that.
Keep in mind that at current rates the world will be about 4x richer in 2050 compared to today. Per capita. Adjusted for inflation. Given the tight correlation between energy use and economic growth today it seems like a very questionable conclusion to say that money we spend today in drastically curbing carbon emissions will be so much more effective than anything future societies will be able to do with 4x as much money at their disposal (and all of the technological advances of the next 4 decades as well).
Especially when you consider that the greatest amount of effort needed will be in getting developing countries to avoid massively increasing their Carbon emissions as their economies grow. Personally I think that an affluent, say, Bangladesh capable of dealing with some of the potential negative consequences of global warming is all around a better solution than a Bangladesh which endures yet another century of poverty but avoids emitting much CO2 into the atmosphere. I imagine the Bandladeshis, and the Chinese and the Indians and the Indonesians, etc, etc, feel the same way, and it will be immensely difficult to get them to curb their growth in CO2 production, making anything the G8 does on its own to curb CO2 production completely irrelevant.
Personally, I see plenty of reason to proceed with green initiatives regardless of the global climate change issue. Do I want cleaner air in cities? Yes. Legislation to reduce car emissions has already made a very noticeable impact in my own city in just a decade. Do we really want to have air like they have in China?
The same can be true of power generation. We need more power, and nuclear waste is dangerous * independently* of climate change. Coal and gas have negative impact on our air quality. Thus we are left again with green technologies for now.
I don't know if all the proposed changes intended to help climate change have other benefits like the ones I described. That would be an interesting question to have answered.