Monday, October 30, 2006

The membership drive continues

The Princeton Alumni Weekly reports that George Schultz and Tony Lake have joined the Pigou Club:

While the initiative — which was co-chaired by former secretary of state George Shultz ’42 and former national Security Adviser Anthony Lake — is explicitly bipartisan, it challenges many aspects of the Bush administration’s national security approach....To promote energy independence, they call for a national gas tax that would start at 50 cents per gallon and increase by 20 cents each year for the next 10 years.
Here is the full report.

Today's Washington Post reports that economist Nicholas Stern is likely to join as well, but for somewhat different reasons:

Unchecked global warming will devastate the world economy on the scale of the world wars and the Great Depression, a major British report said Monday....

The author of the British report, Sir Nicholas Stern, a senior government economist, said that acting now to cut greenhouse gas emissions would cost about 1 percent of global GDP each year.

"The evidence shows that ignoring climate change will eventually damage economic growth," said Stern's 700-page report, an effort to quantify the economic cost of climate change.

Here is the Stern report.

Meanwhile, I am pleased to note that the Club's facebook chapter has jumped in membership from 73 yesterday to 219 today. We are still taking new members.