Property & Environment Research Center: Are You Really Green?

As we have gotten richer, we also seem to have moved from addressing current environmental problems toward preventing hypothetical ones. On the endangered species front, today’s green focus is on hypothetical extinctions predicted from biodiversity models rather than on observations of actual threatened animals or plants. People who hypothesize mass extinctions cannot name even a few species that have gone extinct in the last decade. And for the mother of all environmental issues—global warming—we are willing to spend trillions of dollars reducing carbon emissions despite sound reasons to doubt the extent to which warming is human caused and the fact that our actions will have little impact on global temperatures over the next century.