Hi Tom, I presumed that if the PC piece were to be inadequate in some way, it would be a way that John Quiggin would react to. Given his praise of the work, I haven’t checked it out – though will do so if I need to delve into the pure rate of time preference stuff. I liked what Dani Rodrik said on it recently himself quoting another. Or to put it more guardedly, I think I like it. I’d have to read and think and talk a fair bit more about it before I was confident. It’s a tricky area – methodologically and philosophically.

Then again there is a part of me that comes from the Groucho Marx school of time preference. “What has posterity ever done for me?” I’m thinking that if posterity enjoys standards of living twice, ten a hundred times mine (depending on which bit of posterity we’re thinking about), is it really so wrong of me to snaffle a bit of its loot? So in short, I have no great problem with a higher discount rate than Stern if the tradeoff is purely economic. I might even go so far as a commercial discount rate. But of course there’s more to it than that. The economic costs come with irreversible environmental changes, and I’d be happy to sacrifice a fair bit not to cause them.

I think we’re a fair way off still. I wonder how long we can wait. I don’t share your view that we’ve been amongst the least cynical, but maybe I’m conditioned by the last eleven years of Federal government.

How do we allocate for population properly? Population as at 1990?

Nitpicks: economists fingers were all over the Kyoto Protocol (and a good thing too); cachet not cache; calling scientists alarmist sounds negative, and dismissive, but it appears they have been overcautious in many predictions.