Questions For Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman 's Op-Ed piece today excoriates Exxon for being an "Enemy of the Planet." The piece begins with a swipe at Lee Raymond's reported $686 million in compensation over the 13 years he has headed Exxon. Krugman obviously believes this is obscene. "But that," he says, "is not a reason to single him out for special excoriation. Executive compensation is out of control in corporate America as a whole, and unlike other grossly overpaid business leaders, Mr. Raymond can at least claim to have made money for his stockholders."

No, says Krugman, "There's a better reason to excoriate Mr. Raymond: for the sake of his company's bottom line, and perhaps his own personal enrichment, he turned Exxon Mobil into an enemy of the planet." Exxon, is an "enemy of the planet," of course, because it elected to "fight the science" regarding global warming.

Since Krugman holds himself out as an economist, I decided to send him an e-mail asking him the two questions that really bother me about both of these issues. Here is the e-mail:

Mr. Krugman:

I have two questions [about your Exxon Op-Ed piece]:

1. What criteria do you use in concluding the Lee Raymond (or anyone) is "grossly overpaid" (or underpaid)?

2. On the issue of global warming, what do you make of George Will's point (see www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/31/AR2006033101707.html) that 30 years ago, we had a similar degree of scientific consensus that we were headed for another ice age? More generally, what do we do about the fact that the scientific consensus at any given moment in time can be spectacularly wrong. Think everything from Ptolemy to Piltdown man; from flat earth to alchemy, form swine flu to the idea (known as "acid rain") that SO2 emissions from power plants were responsible for acidification of Adirondack lakes.

I am not troglodyte on the issue of global warming that my question may make me appear to be. I am actually concerned about the issue. But I am also concerned about this: the costs of doing what the scientific consensus says we should be doing are stupefyingly large and that fact needs to be factored into this debate. Is the cost of preventing global warming times the probability that we will be able to do so greater or less than the cost of global warming itself times the probability that those costs (whatever they are) will occur if we do nothing? I do not know the answer to that, nor do I think anyone else does either. But I think it is unreasonable to ignore the fact that there are probability functions on both sides of the equations and that both of those probabilities are probably significantly less than 1.

If he answers either question, I'll post the response. But don't hold your breath.