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Sherwood Rowland
Thomas Schelling was the Nobel Prize-winning economist who chaired the NAS’s second review panel on global warming. Based on the dubious assumption that future environmental destruction has little significant economic cost, Schelling concluded that it’s best to do nothing about climate change and simply deal with its negative consequences when they arrive. The “merchants of doubt” largely imitated Schelling’s “wait and see” attitude.
Thomas Schelling Quotes in Merchants of Doubt
The Merchants of Doubt quotes below are all either spoken by Thomas Schelling or refer to Thomas Schelling. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 6
Quotes
Schelling’s attempt to ignore the cause of global warming was pretty peculiar. It was equivalent to arguing that medical researchers shouldn’t try to cure cancer, because that would be too expensive, and in any case people in the future might decide that dying from cancer is not so bad. But it was based on an ordinary economic principle—the same principle invoked by Fred Singer when discussing acid rain—namely, discounting. A dollar today is worth more to us than a dollar tomorrow and a lot more than a dollar a century from now, so we can “discount” faraway costs. This is what Schelling was doing, presuming that the changes under consideration were “beyond the lifetimes of contemporary decision-makers.”
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Thomas Schelling Quotes in Merchants of Doubt
The Merchants of Doubt quotes below are all either spoken by Thomas Schelling or refer to Thomas Schelling. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 6
Quotes
Schelling’s attempt to ignore the cause of global warming was pretty peculiar. It was equivalent to arguing that medical researchers shouldn’t try to cure cancer, because that would be too expensive, and in any case people in the future might decide that dying from cancer is not so bad. But it was based on an ordinary economic principle—the same principle invoked by Fred Singer when discussing acid rain—namely, discounting. A dollar today is worth more to us than a dollar tomorrow and a lot more than a dollar a century from now, so we can “discount” faraway costs. This is what Schelling was doing, presuming that the changes under consideration were “beyond the lifetimes of contemporary decision-makers.”
Related Characters:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
