Stay Cool On Global Warming

Bjørn Lomborg is a Danish statistician and author of the book Cool It!: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming. He believes that global warming is real but that the rhetoric of climate change is overwrought and the policies advanced to combat it are ineffective and counterproductive. Lomborg’s book takes a cold, hard look at the empirical facts, and weighs the costs and benefits of global warming and the policy solutions advanced to restrain it. He recently gave an interview to NRO’s Kathryn Jean Lopez. The article is entitled Don’t Freak Out: Bjørn Lomborg speaks climate sense to nonsense.

Lomborg was asked about John McCain’s recent speech on climate change.

Kathryn Jean Lopez: What did you think of John McCain’s speech on climate change Monday?

Bjørn Lomborg: McCain strikes some of the right notes — he says he recognizes the need for clean, affordable alternatives to fossil fuels; he acknowledges that climate change is real (although there are very few leaders these days who don’t) and he says that we need to deal with the central facts.

But then he doesn’t stay focused on the central facts himself, and ends up reaching some conclusions that are not so sound: he pushes for a cap-and-trade scheme which will do very little good while imposing very high costs. In his speech notes, McCain planned to call for punitive tariffs on China and India, but he omitted that from his delivered speech: hopefully because he realized that protectionism for green reasons can be just as harmful as protectionism for plain old economic reasons.

Lopez: What’s the most disappointing part of his approach?

Lomborg: Instead of looking at the best answers to this problem, McCain is embracing those that are talked about the most.

Lopez than asks about the central idea of a cap-and-trade system.

Lopez: His “free-market” talk is good stuff though, isn’t it? I know I like free markets.

Lomborg: To some, a cap-and-trade system might sound like a neat approach where the market sorts everything out. But in fact, in some ways it is worse than a tax. With a tax, the costs are obvious. With a cap-and-trade system, the costs are hidden and shifted around. For that reason, many politicians tend to like it. But that is dangerous. It’s misleading not to recognize that the costs of cap-and-trade — financially and in terms of jobs, household consumption, and growth — will be significant. Some big businesses in privileged positions could make a fortune from exploiting this rather rigged market — but their gain is no reason to support the system.

For more criticism of a cap-and-trade system read Just Say No to Climate-Tax Hikes by Phil Kerpen. But in the meantime back to Lomborg.

Lopez: Is there anything worthwhile about Kyoto?

Lomborg: Kyoto burned a lot of political capital to create a response to climate change that costs a fortune but achieves very little.

The climate models show that the Kyoto protocol would have postponed the effects of global warming by seven days by the end of the century. Even if the U.S. and Australia had signed on and everyone stuck to Kyoto for this entire century, we would postpone the effects of global warming by only five years — at a cost of $180 billion each year.

Lopez: What could the planet do instead of Kyoto?

Lomborg: We need to make carbon-emissions cuts much easier. The typical cost of cutting a ton of CO2 is about $20 right now — but we know that the damage from a ton of carbon in the atmosphere is about $2. We need to reduce the cost of cutting emissions from $20 to somewhere nearer $2.

We can achieve this by spending dramatically more researching and developing low-carbon energy. Ideally, every nation should commit to spending 0.05 percent of its gross domestic production exploring non-carbon-emitting energy technologies — be they wind, wave, or solar power — or capturing CO2 emissions from power plants. This spending could add up to about $25 billion a year, but it would still be seven times cheaper than the Kyoto protocol, yet increase global research and development tenfold. All nations would be involved, but the richer ones would pay the larger share.

Today, solar panels are ten times more inefficient than the cheapest fossil fuels. Only the very wealthy can afford them. Many “green” approaches, right now, do little more than make rich people feel like they are helping the planet.

We can’t solve climate change by just forcing more inefficient solar panels onto people’s rooftops. The solution is to dramatically increase R&D so that solar panels become cheaper than fossil fuels sooner. Imagine if solar panels became cheaper than fossil fuels by 2050 — we would have solved global warming then, because switching to the environmentally friendly option wouldn’t be the preserve of rich Westerners.

Here is the problem with Lomborg’s approach. The message of climate change alarmists such as Al Gore has been so ingrained in the public consciousness that to argue against the alarm is to be seen as unintelligent, eccentric, or lying for some nefarious purpose (such as being in thrall to “Big Oil”). I disagree with John McCain on a great many issues, climate change included. I am not sure if his position is what he truly believes or is simply one taken because he can’t afford NOT to have a plan to combat climate change.

Too often public fear leads politicians to do something about a problem in the short-term that makes it worse in the long-term. Expensive measures might make us feel better about ourselves, but they will do little to help. They will, however, hurt our economy, make us less wealthy in the future and thus less able to afford things that WILL help.