Man-made global warming is real. The solutions being touted are not

5 December 2009

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The pledges many countries will make on greenhouse gas emissions in Copenhagen are pure fantasy, says Bjørn Lomborg. We must pursue other options

So to put this in the starkest of terms: drastic carbon cuts themselves would hurt us much more than climate change itself. What’s more, this ‘solution’ would make very little impact to that climate change. It is a question of proportionality. Cutting carbon is extremely expensive, especially in the short-term, because the alternatives to fossil fuels are few and costly.

The good news is that there are smarter policies. This year, the Copenhagen Consensus highlighted some serious options when it commissioned new research from climate economists looking at different responses to global warming, and then asked Nobel laureate economists to examine and rank the different solutions.

The smartest of all would be dramatically to increase public funds for research into non-carbon-based energy. Every dollar spent could avoid $11 worth of climate damage. Alternative energy technologies are far from ready to take up the slack from fossil fuels. Green energy needs to power the future. To get there, we must invest in research today. Instead of spending $180 billion a year trying to cut carbon emissions, we should allocate 0.2 per cent of global GDP, or $100 billion, to developing alternative energy. In the short term, we should also invest a small amount — much less than $1 billion per year — into researching climate engineering technology called ‘marine cloud whitening’, which shows great promise in delaying many effects of global warming, buying us more time to make a shift away from fossil fuels. If this works (which, to be sure, we still need to establish), it could essentially avoid all global warming throughout the 21st century at a cost of just $9 billion in total — thousands of times cheaper than other proposals.

We have no more time to waste on a foolhardy, flawed response to global warming. Growing disillusionment with carbon cuts is not a sign that the public has failed to understand the problem. It is a sign of the vast challenges that are inherent in trying to cut carbon in the short term. The greatest hope for Copenhagen is that politicians will emerge with the realisation that we need to solve global warming in a more sensible, enlightened way.

Bjørn Lomborg is the director of the Denmark-based think-tank the Copenhagen Consensus Center at Copenhagen Business School and the author of Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming.