Remember Cowen’s Second Law: There is a literature on everything. In this case, the man who wrote the book on environmental libertarianism is a member of our local Santa Clara County LP: Dr. Fred Foldvary, economist at San Jose State University.
His article on the Green Tax Shift is still the best single public policy essay I've ever read.
That and many other articles on green libertarianism (a.k.a. ecolibertarianism a.k.a. geolibertarianism) are at http://earthfreedom.net/ecolibertarianism
I'll only add a couple points about short-term tactics and long-term perspective:
Short-term: environmentalism is an irresistible force in our modern culture -- similar to increasing social tolerance, or the weakening of religion. Libertarianism benefits from the latter two, but opposes environmentalism at its mortal peril. Luckily, economic analysis demonstrates that the best environmental policy is to use pricing -- - music to libertarian ears! So libertarians need to learn the tune, or else become a bug on the windshield.
Long-term: Warming from anthropogenic greenhouse gases is real, but the risks are overblown. Since the Cambrian explosion, life on Earth has handily endured periods much warmer than now and much cooler than now. Even in its brief tenure, H. sapiens has endured much bigger differences in temperature and sea level than what we now face. Heck, it's probably worth a few feet of sea-level rise to defrost the wastelands of Siberia and Canada.
The only greenhouse problem we can't engineer our way out of is species loss. Global warming may very well be causing an extinction spike that dwarfs the Columbian Exchange and rivals the Quaternary extinction (overkill by human hunters migrating to new continents). Handling species loss is a poorly-developed area of libertarian ethics and policy. But when the species loss is primarily due to greenhouse-gas emissions, the answer is clear: add a pollution cost to the price of polluting products/transactions. (This doesn't require world government, any more than worldwide low tariffs after WWII have required world government.)
Showing posts with label Ecology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ecology. Show all posts
Saturday, March 24, 2018
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Environmental Kuznets Curves and Pigovian Taxes
There's just no question in the economic literature whether environmnental quality is what is called a "normal good" -- i.e., one that is demanded more as incomes grow. See e.g. Environmental Quality Is A Normal Good (2003) by a couple of Canadian economists. In fact, if you search on the phrase "environmental quality is a normal good", you find lots of papers by economists asserting this. The underlying phenomenon is called the Environmental Kuznets Curve, which is described in Wikipedia thus:
Another situation where Kuznets type curves appear is the environment. It is claimed that many environmental health indicators, such as water and air pollution, show the inverted U-shape: in the beginning of economic development, little weight is given to environmental concerns, raising pollution along with industrialization. After a threshold, when basic physical needs are met, interest in a clean environment rises, reversing the trend. Now society has the funds, as well as willingness to spend to reduce pollution. This relation holds most clearly true for a many pollutants, such as sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, lead, DDT, chlorofluorocarbons, sewage, and many other chemicals previously released directly into the air or bodies of water.
PERC (a leading market-oriented environmental think tank) writes in The Environmental Kuznets Curve: A Primer:
Since 1991, when economists first reported a systematic relationship between income changes and environmental quality, this relationship, known as the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC), has become standard fare in technical conversations about environmental policy (Grossman and Krueger 1991). When first unveiled, EKCs revealed a surprising outcome: Some important indicators of environmental quality such as the levels of sulfur dioxide and particulates in the air actually improved as incomes and levels of consumption went up.
Prior to the advent of EKCs, many well-informed people believed that richer economies damaged and even destroyed their natural resource endowments at a faster pace than poorer ones. They thought that environmental quality could only be achieved by escaping the clutches of industrialization and the desire for higher incomes. The EKC's paradoxical relationship cast doubt on this assumption.
We now know far more about the linkages between an economy and its environment than we did before 1991. This primer shares this knowledge. [...]
However, income growth without institutional reform is not likely to be enough. Improvement of the environment with income growth is not automatic but depends on policies and institutions. GDP growth creates the conditions for environmental improvement by raising the demand for improved environmental quality and makes the resources available for supplying it. Whether environmental quality improvements materialize or not, when, and how, depend critically on government policies, social institutions, and the completeness and functioning of markets.
Better policies, such as the removal of distorting subsidies, the introduction of more secure property rights over resources, and the imposition of pollution taxes to connect actions taken to prices paid will flatten the underlying EKC and perhaps achieve an earlier turning point. The effects of market-based policies on environmental quality are expected to be unambiguously positive.
All the mechanisms on Guy's list (posted on the private PlatCom forum) are just ways that higher-income societies seek to satisfy that demand for a cleaner environment. The only item on the list that argues against the validity of the basic point is the claim that higher-income societies can in effect export their pollution. This is called the Pollution Haven Hypothesis, and is discussed on pp. 14-17 of the full PDF of the PERC primer. The empirical data suggests that any such haven effect is swamped by the EKC effect of the rising income in the "haven" country.
Note that the EKC effect needs smart policy like pollution taxes in order to work. Pollution taxes (aka Pigovian taxes) are almost universally regarded as a no-brainer in the literature of market-oriented environmentalism, and there is even a "Pigou Club" of famous economists who are petitioning for this policy. Such anti-aggression taxes are supported by several of us on PlatCom, but the LP's radical thought police make such policies verboten in the LP Platform. So what we have here is 1) a top-of-mind voter issue, combined with 2) a consensus market-oriented solution for the issue that is accepted by economists of all ideologies, and that 3) is not embraced by any of the LP's competing parties. So is the LP jumping all over this policy position? Of course not! What do you think we are? A party that advocates the leading market-based solutions? Nope.
I'll close by applauding Rob Power's recent comments about Mary Ruwart on the Outright forum:
her only arguments on pollution are regarding the point source type, e.g., a factory dumping mercury into the river, to which her answer is that the people downstream sue the factory into oblivion. http://www.ruwart.com/environ2.lpn.wpd.html This well-reasoned argument was fine for 30 years ago when urban rivers were flammable, but it simply doesn't work for modern non-point-source pollution that every living thing contributes to. This has been a concern of mine for a long time. She has a few topics on which she offers nothing more than hand-waving arguments, which only works in a room full of friendly libertarians -- it easily gets torn apart by non-libertarians.
I'd like to ask people who dismiss Platform reformers as "Republican lite": can one advocate taxing environmental aggression and still be considered a real libertarian?
Friday, January 11, 2008
Tax Bads and Untax Goods With a Green Tax Shift
by Fred E. Foldvary
The tax reform that would best promote liberty, the environment, and prosperity is to tax bad things instead of good things. Labor, entrepreneurship, and wanted products are good things, yet these get taxed as though they were crimes that need to be punished. Pollution and congestion are bad things, yet these are in effect subsidized as though we wanted more of them. The forced redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich is usually considered a bad thing, yet government makes this transfer with taxes and subsidies.
Good products and activities are those that are voluntary, not just for the buyer and seller, but also for others who may be affected. Generally, production, trade, and consumption are good things, as they provide the goods that people want. Bad products and activities are those that are not voluntary, as they coercively harm others. The prime examples of bads are pollution and congestion. Economists call these “negative externalities,” since they impose costs on others. For example, each extra car on a crowded road slows down the traffic for the other cars.
A free market maximizes social well being. Any tax on voluntary enterprise reduces social well being, but also, any subsidy reduces social welfare. In a pure free market, all economic activity is voluntary, and those who impose costs on others are obligated to compensate the victims.
Taxes on wages, business profits, goods, and exchanges impose two types of costs on the parties. The first cost is the tax burden, the funds the taxed people have to pay to the government. This is a burden to the taxpayers, but it is not a cost to the economy, as the funds represent resources transferred from taxpayers to the recipients.
The second cost is called the “excess burden” or “deadweight loss” caused by the tax. Suppose you are buying a car for $20,000 and there is a ten percent sales tax. The total cost is $22,000 and if you borrow the funds to pay with, you need to borrow an extra $2000, and pay interest on that extra amount. Those who would just barely be willing to buy the car at $20,000 will not do so at the higher cost, so the purchase and production of cars gets reduced. Even those who do pay the higher cost get less net benefit, as the difference from the most they are willing to pay and what they actually pay gets reduced, reducing their benefits from the goods.
The excess burden is even worse than that for some products. For example, for goods such as books that have a global market, the seller can’t raise the price, and the tax eats into the profit, and in many cases, that type of enterprise ceases to function, and is replaced by one which can bear the tax but possibly creates less output and employs fewer workers. Any intervention in the market that drives out some enterprises will replace them with less-valued enterprises, since otherwise those replacements would have been there in the first place.
Taxes on wages, business profits, buildings, and trade all have such a deadweight loss. The total deadweight loss from taxation in the U.S.A. has been estimated to be over ten percent of total income. This is a sheer waste of resources, and the loss is much greater over time, as the economy could have grown faster if not for this drag on productivity.
Subsidies also have a deadweight loss, since the burden of the tax is greater than the benefits to those who are subsidized. That’s because the subsidy gets some people to buy products at a lower price, but the extra benefit these people get from those goods is less than if they had bought the products they would have gotten if not for the subsidy. For example, suppose the government subsidizes pizza so consumers only pay a dime per slice. More folks would buy the cheap pizzas, but the value to them of the last extra slices is less than the cost of production, so this is really a waste of resources. With both punitive taxes and the handout of subsidies, resources are not allocated to where they are most wanted by those who would cover the costs.
The green tax shift would eliminate such excess burdens. It shifts public revenue to bad things and activities. When pollution crosses the owner’s property and enters the property of others, including people’s bodies, this is a trespass and a violation of others’ property rights. When there are only a few people or firms involved, they can negotiate a settlement, or the victim should be able to sue for damages. But when there are thousands, even millions, of people involved, lawsuits become impractical. In that case, an on-going pollution charge can compensate society for the damages. If the government levies the charge, it can take the form of a tax, but in substance, it is restitution and compensation for damages. In form, the pollution charge is a tax on a bad activity, committing aggression against others by polluting.
Why not just prohibit the pollution? Because, the products have social benefits, which would be lost if the goods are not allowed to be produced. A pollution charge equal to the damages will reduce the output to the optimal amount, where the harm and benefit are balanced, along with compensating society for that pollution emitted.
Regulations are less effective than pollution charges, because regulations do not let firms and individuals adjust their activities according to their own costs and benefits. With pollution levies, firms and individuals have the choice of reducing pollution or paying the charge, and they will do whichever of these is less costly.
Pollution permits that can be bought and sold are more effective than regulations, but the gain from a higher permit price goes to the permit holder. The advantage of pollution taxes is that the revenue from these charges can be used to replace punitive taxes, those with deadweight losses. If pollution taxes raise $500 billion in government revenue, and are used to, say, reduce income taxes, and they replace regulations, there is a double dividend: a cleaner environment, and greater productivity.
The same can be done with congestion. Tolls on crowded highways and streets, just high enough to let the traffic flow, put a charge on a bad activity, congestion, which eliminates it. Such tols can now be implemented with electronic devices that automatically record the charge without the car having to stop.
Congestion tolls would replace taxes such as on gasoline. Gasoline is good - it makes our cars go. Transportation is a good thing, and as such should not be taxed. What is bad is the outputs - pollution and congestion, not the input, gasoline. Those who drive clean cars on uncongested roads do no harm and should not be taxed. Moreover, the efficiency of gasoline use should be nobody’s business except the buyer. Why is it my problem if you waste resources you paid for? It’s your problem.
Cash subsidies to special interests such as farmers are obvious, but other subsidies are just as real and costly to society. Quotas that restrict imports raise the price of goods such as sugar, and are in effect a tax on consumers. The greatest subsidy of all is the implicit transfer of wealth from workers to landowners.
When government provides public works and civic services - such as streets, transit, parks, security, fire protection, and schools - these increase the productivity and benefits of the locations served, and increase the demand to be located there. That generates higher rents and real estate values. If, as is usually the case, most of the funds come from taxes on wages, in effect worker tenants get double billed. A worker-tenant pays a higher rent because of the territorial services, and then he has to pay taxes to finance them. The landowners get subsidized by getting rent and land value paid for by the taxes on wages, goods, and business profits. Since landowners tend to be wealthier than renters, taxing wages to pay for civic goods amounts to a forced redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich.
Subsidies are bads, so a tax on land value or land rent is a tax on a bad. In substance, it is a payment for services that generate rent and land value. Unlike taxes on production, a tax on land value has no deadweight loss, since the land will not flee, shrink, or hide when taxed. If a landlord was already charging the market rent, a higher tax on land will not be passed onto the tenant, since that would create vacancies.
The supply of land area is fixed, and land has no cost of production, so the rent is a pure surplus that can be tapped for public revenue with no ill effect. It can even have a beneficial effect if lazy landowners were not putting their land to its most productive use, since the land-value tax is based on the highest and best use of the land as determined by the market prices of the neighborhood. After the tax is in place, a new land owner would have no tax burden, since the price of land would fall, and what the owner pays in the land tax, he saves in not having to pay mortgage interest.
Of course the same effect can take place if public works and civic services are privatized, as they are with condominiums, homeowner associations, and proprietary communities such as apartments and shopping centers. Members of condominiums pay a monthly assessment based on their membership and property rather than on their income or purchase of goods.
A complete green-tax shift would abolish taxes on wages, interest, dividends, transactions, and buildings, and replace these with charges for pollution, tolls on congested roads and streets, and the public collection of land rent. The pollution levy would also replace regulations and pollution permits. The economy would prosper from the elimination of the deadweight losses from both taxation and regulation.
Advocates of free markets should enthusiastically support the green tax shift, as this enhances liberty along with greater prosperity. There would be no more intrusive tax audits and no snooping into private financial affairs. There would be no tax evasion, since land cannot hide, and pollution levies are based on measured pollution. The penalty for refusal to pay the levy would be a loss of property, not prison. Entrepreneurship would be completely unshackled, and market prices and profits would no longer be distorted by taxes and subsidies, since levies on pollution and land value make users pay for the costs of their production and consumption.
Even if human activity is not contributing to global warming, the green tax shift is good for liberty and the economy. If pollution is causing climate change, then the reduction of harmful global warming would be a bonus.
Freedom is green, and the best environmental policy is a pure free market, since an inefficient use of resources needlessly destroys the environment. The promotion of a green tax shift would put the free market movement at the vanguard of the environmental and move it away form its current propensity to favor market-hampering regulation. With the green tax shift, environmentalists and free-marketeers will find common ground.
—–
Dr. Fred Foldvary teaches economics at Santa Clara University and is the author of several books including The Soul of Liberty, Public Goods and Private Communities, and the Dictionary of Free-Market Economics.
Good products and activities are those that are voluntary, not just for the buyer and seller, but also for others who may be affected. Generally, production, trade, and consumption are good things, as they provide the goods that people want. Bad products and activities are those that are not voluntary, as they coercively harm others. The prime examples of bads are pollution and congestion. Economists call these “negative externalities,” since they impose costs on others. For example, each extra car on a crowded road slows down the traffic for the other cars.
A free market maximizes social well being. Any tax on voluntary enterprise reduces social well being, but also, any subsidy reduces social welfare. In a pure free market, all economic activity is voluntary, and those who impose costs on others are obligated to compensate the victims.
Taxes on wages, business profits, goods, and exchanges impose two types of costs on the parties. The first cost is the tax burden, the funds the taxed people have to pay to the government. This is a burden to the taxpayers, but it is not a cost to the economy, as the funds represent resources transferred from taxpayers to the recipients.
The second cost is called the “excess burden” or “deadweight loss” caused by the tax. Suppose you are buying a car for $20,000 and there is a ten percent sales tax. The total cost is $22,000 and if you borrow the funds to pay with, you need to borrow an extra $2000, and pay interest on that extra amount. Those who would just barely be willing to buy the car at $20,000 will not do so at the higher cost, so the purchase and production of cars gets reduced. Even those who do pay the higher cost get less net benefit, as the difference from the most they are willing to pay and what they actually pay gets reduced, reducing their benefits from the goods.
The excess burden is even worse than that for some products. For example, for goods such as books that have a global market, the seller can’t raise the price, and the tax eats into the profit, and in many cases, that type of enterprise ceases to function, and is replaced by one which can bear the tax but possibly creates less output and employs fewer workers. Any intervention in the market that drives out some enterprises will replace them with less-valued enterprises, since otherwise those replacements would have been there in the first place.
Taxes on wages, business profits, buildings, and trade all have such a deadweight loss. The total deadweight loss from taxation in the U.S.A. has been estimated to be over ten percent of total income. This is a sheer waste of resources, and the loss is much greater over time, as the economy could have grown faster if not for this drag on productivity.
Subsidies also have a deadweight loss, since the burden of the tax is greater than the benefits to those who are subsidized. That’s because the subsidy gets some people to buy products at a lower price, but the extra benefit these people get from those goods is less than if they had bought the products they would have gotten if not for the subsidy. For example, suppose the government subsidizes pizza so consumers only pay a dime per slice. More folks would buy the cheap pizzas, but the value to them of the last extra slices is less than the cost of production, so this is really a waste of resources. With both punitive taxes and the handout of subsidies, resources are not allocated to where they are most wanted by those who would cover the costs.
The green tax shift would eliminate such excess burdens. It shifts public revenue to bad things and activities. When pollution crosses the owner’s property and enters the property of others, including people’s bodies, this is a trespass and a violation of others’ property rights. When there are only a few people or firms involved, they can negotiate a settlement, or the victim should be able to sue for damages. But when there are thousands, even millions, of people involved, lawsuits become impractical. In that case, an on-going pollution charge can compensate society for the damages. If the government levies the charge, it can take the form of a tax, but in substance, it is restitution and compensation for damages. In form, the pollution charge is a tax on a bad activity, committing aggression against others by polluting.
Why not just prohibit the pollution? Because, the products have social benefits, which would be lost if the goods are not allowed to be produced. A pollution charge equal to the damages will reduce the output to the optimal amount, where the harm and benefit are balanced, along with compensating society for that pollution emitted.
Regulations are less effective than pollution charges, because regulations do not let firms and individuals adjust their activities according to their own costs and benefits. With pollution levies, firms and individuals have the choice of reducing pollution or paying the charge, and they will do whichever of these is less costly.
Pollution permits that can be bought and sold are more effective than regulations, but the gain from a higher permit price goes to the permit holder. The advantage of pollution taxes is that the revenue from these charges can be used to replace punitive taxes, those with deadweight losses. If pollution taxes raise $500 billion in government revenue, and are used to, say, reduce income taxes, and they replace regulations, there is a double dividend: a cleaner environment, and greater productivity.
The same can be done with congestion. Tolls on crowded highways and streets, just high enough to let the traffic flow, put a charge on a bad activity, congestion, which eliminates it. Such tols can now be implemented with electronic devices that automatically record the charge without the car having to stop.
Congestion tolls would replace taxes such as on gasoline. Gasoline is good - it makes our cars go. Transportation is a good thing, and as such should not be taxed. What is bad is the outputs - pollution and congestion, not the input, gasoline. Those who drive clean cars on uncongested roads do no harm and should not be taxed. Moreover, the efficiency of gasoline use should be nobody’s business except the buyer. Why is it my problem if you waste resources you paid for? It’s your problem.
Cash subsidies to special interests such as farmers are obvious, but other subsidies are just as real and costly to society. Quotas that restrict imports raise the price of goods such as sugar, and are in effect a tax on consumers. The greatest subsidy of all is the implicit transfer of wealth from workers to landowners.
When government provides public works and civic services - such as streets, transit, parks, security, fire protection, and schools - these increase the productivity and benefits of the locations served, and increase the demand to be located there. That generates higher rents and real estate values. If, as is usually the case, most of the funds come from taxes on wages, in effect worker tenants get double billed. A worker-tenant pays a higher rent because of the territorial services, and then he has to pay taxes to finance them. The landowners get subsidized by getting rent and land value paid for by the taxes on wages, goods, and business profits. Since landowners tend to be wealthier than renters, taxing wages to pay for civic goods amounts to a forced redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich.
Subsidies are bads, so a tax on land value or land rent is a tax on a bad. In substance, it is a payment for services that generate rent and land value. Unlike taxes on production, a tax on land value has no deadweight loss, since the land will not flee, shrink, or hide when taxed. If a landlord was already charging the market rent, a higher tax on land will not be passed onto the tenant, since that would create vacancies.
The supply of land area is fixed, and land has no cost of production, so the rent is a pure surplus that can be tapped for public revenue with no ill effect. It can even have a beneficial effect if lazy landowners were not putting their land to its most productive use, since the land-value tax is based on the highest and best use of the land as determined by the market prices of the neighborhood. After the tax is in place, a new land owner would have no tax burden, since the price of land would fall, and what the owner pays in the land tax, he saves in not having to pay mortgage interest.
Of course the same effect can take place if public works and civic services are privatized, as they are with condominiums, homeowner associations, and proprietary communities such as apartments and shopping centers. Members of condominiums pay a monthly assessment based on their membership and property rather than on their income or purchase of goods.
A complete green-tax shift would abolish taxes on wages, interest, dividends, transactions, and buildings, and replace these with charges for pollution, tolls on congested roads and streets, and the public collection of land rent. The pollution levy would also replace regulations and pollution permits. The economy would prosper from the elimination of the deadweight losses from both taxation and regulation.
Advocates of free markets should enthusiastically support the green tax shift, as this enhances liberty along with greater prosperity. There would be no more intrusive tax audits and no snooping into private financial affairs. There would be no tax evasion, since land cannot hide, and pollution levies are based on measured pollution. The penalty for refusal to pay the levy would be a loss of property, not prison. Entrepreneurship would be completely unshackled, and market prices and profits would no longer be distorted by taxes and subsidies, since levies on pollution and land value make users pay for the costs of their production and consumption.
Even if human activity is not contributing to global warming, the green tax shift is good for liberty and the economy. If pollution is causing climate change, then the reduction of harmful global warming would be a bonus.
Freedom is green, and the best environmental policy is a pure free market, since an inefficient use of resources needlessly destroys the environment. The promotion of a green tax shift would put the free market movement at the vanguard of the environmental and move it away form its current propensity to favor market-hampering regulation. With the green tax shift, environmentalists and free-marketeers will find common ground.
—–
Dr. Fred Foldvary teaches economics at Santa Clara University and is the author of several books including The Soul of Liberty, Public Goods and Private Communities, and the Dictionary of Free-Market Economics.
Sunday, October 01, 2006
Does Optimal Virulance Imply Super-Germs Are Possible?
I suspect that the greatest anthropogenic extinction threat in this century is the possibility of a natural pathogen engineered (perhaps somewhat accidentally) to spread easily from person to person, persist in the environment, resist antibiotics and immune responses, and cause 100% mortality without evolving toward less virulence. I would like to hear expert opinion on whether evolutionary pressure toward optimal virulence has kept pathogens from exploring the most dangerous parts of the virulence landscape. I'm hoping that pathogens spread by intermediaries (e.g., vectors and wastes) have had little incentive to avoid those parts of the landscape, and that mad scientists will thus not find any magic bullets there. But just as certain well-known technologies (e.g. the wheel, internal combustion) seem to be unreachable in evolution's search space, I worry that there are techniques for increased virulence that a mad scientist could find much more easily than evolution ever could.
I also worry that I'm simply ignorant of the heights of virulence that evolution has already been able to reach. Is there a survey of the worst known and suspected cases of pathogenic (near-)extinction in humans, mammals, and animals in general? For example,
- Variola major and a couple other pathogens were together able to kill somewhere between 25% and 95% of native Americans as a result of the Columbian Exchange -- including 100% of the population of Hispaniola.
- The enterobacterium Yersinia pestis in the 14th century killed up to 1/3 of Eurasia's population.
- The Spanish Flu of 1918 killed up to 5% of the world's population.
As horrific as these and other pandemics have been, they are obviously not as bad as extinction. My casual searching on the web found no discussion of continent- or planet-wide animal extinctions caused by pathogens, but I'm skeptical that there haven't been any.
Tuesday, August 15, 2006
Earth's Ultimate Environmental Problem
Over the next millennium and for the rest of human history, earth's major environmental problem will be warming due not to greenhouse gases but rather to increased waste heat from non-solar energy (initially petrochemical, but then fusion). The problem emerges when a world population in the tens of billions all enjoy an energy budget equivalent to levels in the industrialized West in 2000. Humans in 2000 consume 10 terawatts, wherease the total solar energy received by Earth is estimated variously at 109000 to 174000 terawatts. Ten billion humans at U.S. levels of energy use would consume 1000 terawatts. All the waste heat from all the energy uses adds up, and the laws of thermodynamics guarantee that energy use always creates heat exhaust. Heat pollution will have to be managed to prevent a runaway greenhouse effect like on Venus.
Saturday, August 12, 2006
Global Warming & Our Generation's 2 Greatest Crimes
The vast majority of the debate over global warming is caused by two kinds of misdirection. In the first kind, industry interests opposed to amelioration efforts exaggerate the uncertainty and minimize the risks for obvious reasons. In the second, climate researchers exaggerate both the uncertainties and the risks to keep the climate research gravy train going. Anthropogenic global warming is not an urban legend. The urban legends are 1) that global warming might be much more than the expected 2 degrees C over the next 100 years, and 2) that modest global warming will have overwhelmingly negative consequences. The Cato Institute acknowledges that modest warming is underway but recognizes that it will likely provide a modest benefit: http://cato.org/research/articles/michaels-031016.html
My primary worry about anthropogenic global warming is the highly-uncertain possible risks to species in marginal ecosystems. Extinction of species and forgetting of languages are pretty much the only crimes against Earth that wealthy future generations will hold against us. Warming's two biggest threats -- to the Gulf Stream thermohaline circulation and the West Antarctic ice sheet -- are very unlikely to be realized, and moderate warming (up to 2C) would have a net positive impact on the developed (i.e. temperate) world. [For more on this, see Skeptical Environmentalist p301].
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