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1 September, 2010
Source: The Guardian
Bjørn Lomborg: $100bn a year needed to fight climate change Exclusive ‘Sceptical environmentalist’ and critic of climate scientists to declare global warming a chief concern facing world Danish professor Bjorn Lomborg. Photograph: Adrian Dennis/AFP/Getty Images The world’s most high-profile climate change sceptic is to declare that global warming is “undoubtedly one of the chief concerns facing the world today” and “a challenge humanity must confront”, in an apparent U-turn that will give a huge boost to the embattled environmental lobby.Bjørn Lomborg, the self-styled “sceptical environmentalist” once compared to Adolf Hitler by the UN’s climate chief, is famous for attacking climate scientists, campaigners, the media and others for exaggerating the rate of global warming and its effects on humans, and the costly waste of policies to stop the problem.But in a new book to be published next month, Lomborg will call for tens of billions of dollars a year to be invested in tackling climate change. “Investing $100bn annually would mean that we could essentially resolve the climate change problem by the end of this century,” the book concludes.Examining eight methods to reduce or stop global warming, Lomborg and his fellow economists recommend pouring money into researching and developing clean energy sources such as wind, wave, solar and nuclear power, and more work on climate engineering ideas such as “cloud whitening” to reflect the sun’s heat back into the outer atmosphere.In a Guardian interview, he said he would finance investment through a tax on carbon emissions that would also raise $50bn to mitigate the effect of climate change, for example by building better sea defences, and $100bn for global healthcare.His declaration about the importance of action on climate change comes at a crucial point in the debate, with international efforts to agree a global deal on emissions stalled amid a resurgence in scepticism caused by rows over the reliability of the scientific evidence for global warming.The fallout from those rows continued yesterday when Rajendra Pachauri, head of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, came under new pressure to step down after an independent review of the panel’s work called for tighter term limits for its senior executives and greater transparency in its workings. The IPCC has come under fire in recent months following revelations of inaccuracies in the last assessment of global warming, provided to governments in 2007 – for which it won the Nobel peace prize with former the US vice-president Al Gore. The mistakes, including a claim that the Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035, prompted a review of the IPCC’s processes and procedures by the InterAcademy Council (IAC), an organisation of world science bodies.The IAC said the IPCC needed to be as transparent as possible in how it worked, how it selected people to participate in assessments and its choice of scientific information to assess.Although Pachauri once compared Lomborg to Hitler, he has now given an unlikely endorsement to the new book, Smart Solutions to Climate Change. In a quote for the launch, Pachauri said: “This book provides not only a reservoir of information on the reality of human-induced climate change, but raises vital questions and examines viable options on what can be done.”Lomborg denies he has performed a volte face, pointing out that even in his first book he accepted the existence of man-made global warming. “The point I’ve always been making is it’s not the end of the world,” he told the Guardian. “That’s why we should be measuring up to what everybody else says, which is we should be spending our money well.”But he said the crucial turning point in his argument was the Copenhagen Consensus project, in which a group of economists were asked to consider how best to spend $50bn. The first results, in 2004, put global warming near the bottom of the list, arguing instead for policies such as fighting malaria and HIV/Aids. But a repeat analysis in 2008 included new ideas for reducing the temperature rise, some of which emerged about halfway up the ranking. Lomborg said he then decided to consider a much wider variety of policies to reduce global warming, “so it wouldn’t end up at the bottom”.The difference was made by examining not just the dominant international policy to cut carbon emissions, but also seven other “solutions” including more investment in technology, climate engineering, and planting more trees and reducing soot and methane, also significant contributors to climate change, said Lomborg.”If the world is going to spend hundreds of millions to treat climate, where could you get the most bang for your buck?” was the question posed, he added.After the analyses, five economists were asked to rank the 15 possible policies which emerged. Current policies to cut carbon emissions through taxes – of which Lomborg has long been critical – were ranked largely at the bottom of four of the lists. At the top were more direct public investment in research and development rather than spending money on low carbon energy now, and climate engineering.Lomborg acknowledged trust was a problem when committing to long term R&D, but said politicians were already reneging on promises to cut emissions, and spending on R&D would be easier to monitor. Although many believe private companies are better at R&D than governments, Lomborg said low carbon energy was a special case comparable to massive public investment in computers from the 1950s, which later precpitated the commercial IT revolution.Lomborg also admitted climate engineering could cause “really bad stuff” to happen, but argued if it could be a cheap and quick way to reduce the worst impacts of climate change and thus there was an “obligation to at least look at it”.He added: “This is not about ‘we have all got to live with less, wear hair-shirts and cut our carbon emissions’. It’s about technologies, about realising there’s a vast array of solutions.”Despite his change of tack, however, Lomborg is likely to continue to have trenchant critics. Writing for today’s Guardian, Howard Friel, author of the book The Lomborg Deception, said: “If Lomborg were really looking for smart solutions, he would push for an end to perpetual and brutal war, which diverts scarce resources from nearly everything that Lomborg legitimately says needs more money.”Green groups cautiously welcome Bjørn Lomborg’s call for $100bn climate fund’Sceptical environmentalist’ previously argued that countering climate change should be a low priority for governments Bjorn Lomborg argues in his new book Smart Solutions to Climate Change that global warming should now be addressed ‘as a priority’. Photograph: Suzanne Plunkett/Getty Images Self-styled “sceptical environmentalist” Bjørn Lomborg’s call for a $100bn a year global fund for research into climate change solutions was today given a cautious welcome by some leading green groups and thinktanks, but was dismissed by others as politically naive.A Greenpeace spokesperson welcomed the conversion but said it had come two decades too late for Lomborg to be taken seriously. “At least it confirms the happy maxim that nobody’s wrong all the time, apart from Melanie Phillips at the Daily Mail,” the spokesperson added.”It appears that the self-styled sceptical environmentalist is beginning to become less sceptical as he enters middle-age,” said Friends of the Earth climate campaigner Mike Childs, adding that Lomborg’s volte face would come as a “blow to some in the climate sceptics community”.The controversial Danish statistician, who has never denied man’s role in global warming but who has provided an intellectual cover for hard-line climate sceptics, has previously argued that countering climate change should be a low priority for governments. But in his new book Smart Solutions to Climate Change he argues that it should now be addressed “as a priority”.”Lomborg has acknowledged the need for public spending on man-made climate change. He is right that wind, wave and solar are the energy industries in the future and need much greater support from governments. A carbon tax to raise funds is undoubtedly part of the solution, but regulation and public spending also have their place,” said Childs.”But he is still dangerously attracted to pursuing the cheapest, more risky geo-engineering solutions, is putting too much faith in future technologies and R&D, and is not giving enough support to the urgent need to reduce current emissions through rapid deployment of existing solutions and behavioural changes.”Instead of being near the bottom of actions governments should take, as Lomborg argued in 2004, his new book proposes a global carbon tax to raise around $250bn a year to fight the effects of rising temperatures and sea levels. The money would be divided between clean energy research and development ($100bn); low cost geo-engineering solutions such as reflecting solar energy back into space ($1bn); and adaptation to the effects of climate change ($50bn). He further suggests $99bn of the $250bn should be held back to spend on traditional development activities such as clean water and better healthcare in poor countries.Benny Peiser, director of the free market climate change thinktank Global Warming Policy Foundation said his proposals were more sensible than what those being negotiated at the ongoing UN climate talks which are expected to continue into 2011. “I am not surprised. He’s been saying more or less the same for years. The [UN] process is not working at all. This is better and more realistic. His proposals are much more sensible than any attempts to convince China and India to stop emitting,” he said.Lomborg’s proposals are surprisingly close to those favoured by the governments of industrialised countries who have accepted that $100bn a year should be made available to poor countries to adapt and that there should be a heavy emphasis on research into clean energy. However, the idea of a carbon tax has proved politically unacceptable for many years partly because it is thought to penalise poor countries which depend more on carbon-intensive goods.”We would agree that at least $250bn should be raised a year to counter climate change,” said one developing country analyst who asked not to be named. “But Lomborg seems to be saying that proportionately less money should go to developing countries and more to develop western technology. This looks like being totally unacceptable to most of the world.”Bjørn Lomborg: the dissenting climate change voice who changed his tuneWith his new book, Danish scientist Bjørn Lomborg has become an unlikely advocate for huge investment in fighting global warming. But his answers are unlikely to satisfy all climate change campaigners Lomborg advocates that much more attention and money be lavished on climate engineering methods. Photograph: Camera Press Few statisticians can have inspired more passion than Bjørn Lomborg, the Danish academic who became famous as the author of the controversial (some would say contrarian) Skeptical Environmentalist, which set him up as perhaps the world’s best-known critic of the dominant scientific view of global warming and the ensuing climate change.Lomborg’s prolific output has been almost matched by books rubbishing his work: critics have described him as selective, unprofessional and confused. Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN’s climate change panel, has compared him to Adolf Hitler – for the statistical crime of treating human beings too much like numbers.Meanwhile, Time Magazine declared Lomborg one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2004. The respected Cambridge University Press (CUP) has published many of his books in the UK and the US, and the award-winning documentary maker Ondi Timoner and X-Men films producer, Ralph Winter, are about to release a film of his 2007 book Cool It (which carries the subtitle: the first optimistic film about global warming).The Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty once declared Lomborg guilty of exactly that, but a government review later cleared him.Lomborg’s latest book, published by CUP next month, is likely to reignite these passions, because it appears to contradict so much of what he has said before and because he is straying into newly controversial territory. He is advocating that much more attention and money be lavished on climate engineering methods, such as whitening clouds so that they reflect back more of the sun’s heat.Heat is something he is resigned to. When he gives talks, he says, he often meets “people who come up and say: ‘I thought I’d hate you.'”But Lomborg’s record on climate change is more nuanced than the stereotype suggests. From the beginning, he has said global warming is happening and is largely caused by humans. However, he has been consistently critical of what he sees as exaggeration of how much this matters, and of policies to tackle the problem. These would achieve too little and cost too much, he argues, meaning the money would be better spent on, say, reducing malaria and HIV/Aids, or extending clean water and sanitation.In an example of the approach that enraged Pachauri, Lomborg argues in Cool It that predicted temperature rises could save more than 1.3 million lives a year. This, he says, is because many more people would be spared early cold-related deaths than would be at risk from heat-related respiratory fatalities. (Other academics reject his figures.) Lomborg concludes that because of imbalances in where deaths occur, the proposed extension of the Kyoto protocol to cut carbon emissions would “save 4,000 people annually in the developing world [but] end up sacrificing more than a trillion dollars and 80,000 people annually.”Given this background, the title of Lomborg’s new book immediately indicates a change of emphasis. It is called Smart Solutions to Climate Change: Comparing Costs and Benefits. This impression is reinforced by comments in the introduction that climate change is “undoubtedly one of the chief concerns facing the world” and “a challenge that humanity must confront”.Later in the book, reflecting on analysis by five economists of eight types of solution, he estimates that spending $100bn (£65bn) a year “could essentially resolve the climate change problem by the end of this century”.He finishes: “If we care about the environment and about leaving this planet and its inhabitants with the best possible future, we actually have only one option: we all need to start seriously focusing, right now, on the most effective ways to fix global warming.”Speaking to the Guardian about climate engineering as a back-up plan, he raises the possibility of “something really bad lurking around the corner”: the small-chance, big-consequence outcome his previous work appeared to dismiss.Not unexpectedly, however, Lomborg denies performing a U-turn. He reiterates that he has never denied anthropogenic global warming, and insists that he long ago accepted the cost of damage would be between 2% and 3% of world wealth by the end of this century. This estimate is the same, he says, as that quoted by Lord Stern, whose report for the British government argued that the world should spend 1-2% of gross domestic product on tackling climate change to avoid future damage.The Stern report estimated that damage at 5-20% of GDP, however, not 2-3%. The difference, according to Lomborg, is that the two use a different “discount factor”. This is the method by which economists recalculate the value today of money spent or saved in the future – or, to put it another way, the value today of this generation’s grandchildren’s lives. Neither is measurably “right”, he says: they are judgments, albeit ones with a profound impact on subsequent analysis of the costs and benefits of spending money now to stop climate change.Lomborg says false views of his position are held mostly by people who have never read his work. He says: “I keep trying to fight this, mainly because people often hear what I say through others.” These intermediaries are often hostile critics, he adds.Another cause of misunderstandings could be the difference between the content and the tone of his work. In it, brief statements about the unarguable fact of man-made global warming are accompanied by long arguments about how greenhouse gas emissions, the main man-made cause, and temperatures have been higher in the (very distant) past, and by claims that impacts such as rising sea levels and the threat to polar bears have been distorted.Meanwhile, some statements appear to contradict each other directly. In the space of four pages of Cool It, he writes that “climate change will not cause massive disruptions or huge death tolls”, that “the general and long-term impact will be predominantly negative”, and that it is “obvious that there are many other and more pressing issues”.”The point I’ve always been making,” he explains now, “is, it’s not the end of the world. That is why we should be measuring up to what everybody else says, which is we should be spending our money well.”This detailed analysis by economists of how best to spend money to help the world’s people was first reported in his book Global Crises, Global Solutions in 2004. It has now been institutionalised in the Copenhagen Consensus Centre, of which Lomborg is the director, and is the model for the latest book on climate “solutions”.This result is where Lomborg is most vulnerable to allegations of a volte-face on the need to take action on climate change and the value of doing so. But he says circumstances have changed. The first Copenhagen Consensus considered only the predominant idea of cutting carbon emissions through a cap or tax. When the exercise was repeated in 2008, however, the team examined new ideas. Lomborg says he then challenged himself and selected economists to look at eight different “solutions” (comprising 15 policy suggestions). These included boosting R&D in technology, cleaning up soot and methane, which also contribute significantly to global warming, planting more trees, and climate engineering. Critics may argue he should have carried out this study before rubbishing climate policies.As a result, he is still deeply critical of the dominant, cutting-carbon approach, which four of the five economists who were asked to rank the options put at the bottom of their lists. Only Nancy Stokey, of the University of Chicago, ranked lower- and mid-level carbon taxes more highly, around the middle of her list. Instead, the book suggests the best policies would be investment in clean technology research and development, and more climate engineering development work. He suggests this could be funded by a $7-a-tonne tax on carbon emissions, which he says would raise $250bn a year. Of this, $100bn could be spent on clean-tech R&D, about $1bn on climate engineering, $50bn on adapting to changes (building sea defences, for example), and the remaining $99bn or so on “getting virtually everybody on the planet healthcare, basic education, clean drinking water, and so on. It seems a pretty good deal,” he says.Lomborg is not alone in finding fault with the Kyoto process, which many variously agree has been too slow to deliver, too vulnerable to unkept promises, and unrealistic in restraining the aspirations of developing countries. Critics add that it has proved to be a clumsy, ineffective way of delivering necessary investment in energy efficiency and clean electricity, and has resulted in often unnecessarily expensive policies. For most policy areas, such as crime, says Lomborg: “We say to people, what are the smartest ways to deal with this?” Curiously, with climate change, they say there’s a right solution: that’s cutting carbon.”The “biggest bang for the buck” Copenhagen Consensus approach is instinctively commonsense. But it is flawed, say critics, because it relies too heavily on the huge assumptions needed to convert human wellbeing and suffering into numbers (such as the discount rates) and excludes many factors that have simply never been quantified, such as the predicted total loss of coral reefs and other impacts of rapid ocean acidification.Professor Katherine Richardson, a marine biology expert and vice-dean of science at the University of Copenhagen, says: “A lot hinges on whether you think that societal decision should be made by economists alone. [For example] I can think of much cheaper ways of taking care of our elderly in society than building expensive and modern nursing homes. In reality, we get very little return for that investment.”Many climate change scientists also fear huge disruption caused by changing tack will delay political action on avoiding the worst of the problem for a dangerously long time.Lomborg’s aggressively sceptical reputation will no doubt win few such people over, although he says he has no regrets about how he has conducted the debate. “Fundamentally,” he says, “it would have been better if Pachauri or Stern were to make this argument. This isn’t about ownership of the idea, but it’s an idea we need to listen to if we want to get the climate fixed.”
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