The White House rejected on Friday what it called “high cost” scenarios to tackle global warming that were spelled out in the latest report by a United Nations panel on climate change.
“There are measures (for reducing greenhouse gas emissions) that come currently at an extremely high cost because of the lack of available technology,” said James Connaughton, head of the White House Council on Environmental Quality.
These expensive scenarios, he said, would bring cuts in world gross domestic product of as much as 3 percent.
“Well, that would of course cause global recession, so that is something that we probably want to avoid,” Connaughton said in a telephone briefing after the release in Bangkok of the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
http://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/idUSN0433474020070504