Joel Schwartz and Iain Murray team up to deliver arch-luddite Jeremy Rifkin and the “precautionary principle” a one-two punch over at The Commons, a new group blog “promoting environmental quality and human dignity and prosperity through markets and property rights.” Murray challenges Rifkin’s claims that the precautionary principle is required to protect the Earth from dangerous technological developments, and notes that the E.U. has hardly been consistent in its application of the principle. Then Scwhartz takes Rifkin to task for his own hypocritical approach to the precautionary principle. He says the principle is necessary to prevent the use of technologies he doesn’t like, but then turns a blind eye to precautionary concerns about technologies he likes, such as hydrogen energy.
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