"Bush did a lot of bad stuff, but the most enduring and damaging failure of his administration will be his approach to climate change," writes Ryan Avent. And that's probably true. The tough thing about global warming is that it gets harder to solve the longer you wait. The same isn't true for health care, or pulling out of Iraq. Those problems generate misery throughout their life cycle, but the steps required for, say, reforming the health care system aren't dramatically different in 1998 and 2012. Stopping global warming, by contrast, means much sharper and more painful carbon cuts the longer you wait. This is why, broadly speaking, I'm a global warming pessimist and think we're all fairly doomed so far as that goes. But hopefully I'm wrong.
