What Dubner and Levitt couldn’t do in four years…

Brad DeLong does in less than a weekend. He is as enchanted as Robert was*:

My personal favorite is a giant parasol 18,000 miles in diameter at L1 to absorb and then reradiate a chunk of sunlight in other bands.

but notes the reality as well:

But I have never been able to find anyone here at Berkeley who (a) knows what they are talking about, and (b) agrees with Levitt and Dubner that we know that Al Gore efficiency-and-conservation solutions are much less cost-effective than Mt. Pinatubo geoengineering solutions in dealing with global warming.

And summarizes accurately:

[Dubner and Levitt] then failed to do their intellectual due diligence about what they were told [at Myhrvold’s Intellectual Ventures].

Followed by twenty (20) edits for the first half of the chapter.

First, the climate scientists called b*llsh*t. Now, the economists are coming out—and the song remains the same.

It’s becoming more and more obvious why the first book described John Lott as “an economist” and Paul Krugman as a “Bush critic and NYT columnist.”

*Didn’t everyone already read a simpler version of idea in Arthur C. Clarke’s The Fountains of Paradise. And wasn’t that enough of a cautionary tale on how complicated the reality is likely to be?