This looks like an attempt to hijack the cred of a Nobel prize winner for the benefit of pushing the agenda of one "Free Market Institute" based at Texas Tech, in Lubbock Texas, the heart of Texas oil country. I would take everything in this article with a large grain of salt. Especially the characterization of positive steps toward addressing climate change as "mitigations" -- one person's mitigation is another person's highly sustainable renewable energy source that will create jobs at time of sale and installation, and pay dividends for decades to come.
I kind of agree, but there's no doubt that there is an agenda, and it's worth considering that if you don't have the background to assess the objectivity of the article purely on its content. Knowing who profits is an enormously important data point. Every advertisement in existence is going to extol the virtue of their product. It's naive to think that someone who stands to benefit from you "buying" something is going to try to convince you not to.
I'm not an expert on this subject, but here are some thoughts I have.
> Both fans and critics of William Nordhaus’s computer model of the global economy and climate acknowledge that it is a crude approach that omits many crucial real-world considerations.
Does it factor in the famine and wars that will result from global warming?
> As Table 1 indicates, Nordhaus’s model—at least as of its 2007 calibration—estimated that such a policy goal would make humanity $14 trillion poorer compared to doing nothing at all about climate change.
I find this claim the most interesting, because the estimate is that humanity will be much poorer if we do something about climate change. The question is, what will be the distribution of these new riches? Who will be more poor, and who will be more rich? Do the poor starve and die (in say South America and Africa) while the rich make more money?
Do ten oil companies throughout the world get richer while everyone else gets poorer, or maybe even no change? This seems like a plausible outcome too. If the cost of producing food goes up dramatically, only those who are making dramatically more money will be richer.
Ad hominem refers to dismissing an argument out of hand based on the source. In this case, people are willing to engage with the argument, but are additionally pointing out the bias inherent in the source. This is not ad hominem, just a bias warning.
I don't think ad hominem is necessarily dismissing an argument out of hand - it's ignoring the content of an argument in favor of countering the speaker.
Ad hominem isn't always irrelevant, but questioning a source's motivation instead of responding to the arguments they make seems to be ad hominem.
I did read it, and it is attempting to portray what it calls mitigations as strictly negatives with no benefits when in fact they have huge potential as engines of job growth and other positive effects such as long term reduction of pollution outside of just the CO2 being discussed.
