Enquiry

John Tierney reports on Richard’s Branson’s $25 million prize offered for removing 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

The article doesn’t contain any viable-sounding suggestions for accomplishing that (though presumably if Tierney had some ideas, he would have quit the Times already). Much of the article is in fact criticism of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.

Private initiatives such as Branson’s prize are a welcome development. In order to change behavior, you need to change incentives. The environmentalist side of the argument is to offer severe negative incentives — extensive government restriction of the economy — in the hope of preventing a worse environmental outcome. Nobody wants to go that route, and in particular nobody wants to commit to such restrictions while other nations have not. If we can find a way to make the environment greener by making it profitable for someone to make it greener, we’re going to be much better off.