The pledges many countries will make on greenhouse gas emissions in Copenhagen are pure fantasy, says Bjørn Lomborg. We must pursue other options
Judging by the opinion polls, those gathering at the Copenhagen climate change summit have a lot of persuading to do. Just two in five Brits think that global warming is taking place and is man-made. Only one third of Americans think that humans are responsible for climate change. The number of Australians who deem global warming a ‘serious and pressing problem’ has dropped sharply. The urgency which grips politicians around the world seems not to be shared by the general public — to the frustration of people like David Miliband, Britain’s Foreign Secretary. This, he says, demonstrates that the public ‘lack a sense of urgency’.
Yet against the backdrop of a global economic crisis, it is understandable that people everywhere have become more sceptical about policies that stand to cost them a fortune — and, crucially, help the planet very little. We have been shown the terrifying adverts, and the chilling warnings that global warming will be worse than scientists expect. But people are still not convinced. So instead of ‘fixing the public’, we should now try to engineer a better, more effective response to this challenge.
I write as someone who once took it for granted that the world was in a terrible environmental state. My thinking started to change when I analysed the data, and I believe there is cause for optimism. However, it is clear that global warming is real — and that it is man-made.
We owe it to future generations to respond appropriately. And I believe that there are much better, more cost-effective ways to fight global warming than carbon reduction. Also, if we want to fight the problems that will be exacerbated by global warming, the solutions have very little to do with cutting CO2 emissions.
Unfortunately, it became obvious long ago that politicians are unlikely to achieve anything significant in Copenhagen this week, where they hope to negotiate a replacement to the Kyoto protocol, which expires in 2012. This crash carbon dioxide reduction programme is immensely complicated, politically divisive and hugely expensive. Moreover, it is an extremely poor way to help the planet.
First, we have to ask if countries are likely to do what the presidents and prime ministers claim they will do. Many such pledges are essentially fantasies that will not come true. Consider Japan. In June, it committed to cutting greenhouse gas levels by 8 per cent from 1990 levels by 2020. As Professor Roger Pielke Jr noted in a peer-reviewed paper, this would require building nine new nuclear power plants and increasing their use by one third. It would mean building more than a million new wind-turbines, and installing solar panels on nearly three million homes. When such grand promises are made, the only possible outcome is that countries will fail to deliver. We have seen this time and time again, from Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and Kyoto in 1997.
Much attention is placed on alternative forms of energy. But global energy demand will double by 2050, and how is that demand to be met? Alternative energy sources have been hyped by corporate lobbyists and a credulous media to appear far more ready for widespread use than they really are. The truth is that the use of fossil fuels — although much maligned by some — remains absolutely vital for our development, prosperity and survival.
Focus on cutting CO2 emissions has also opened a divide between rich and developing nations. The rapid growth enjoyed by China and India (which is responsible for much of the increase in carbon emissions) is lifting millions of people out of poverty. The Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh recently declared that ‘developing countries cannot and will not compromise on development’. The Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao has said, ‘It’s difficult for China to take quantified emission reduction quotas at the Copenhagen conference, because this country is still at an early stage of development.’
This is why consensus will be so hard to achieve at Copenhagen. And even if all the delegates agreed, the agenda of immediate carbon cuts has a final, fatal flaw: it will cost much more than the expected damage of global warming.
Let us take the pledges agreed at the G8 summit in June: to make enough carbon emission cuts so as to limit global warming to no more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels. This would be the most costly public policy ever enacted. In a paper for the Copenhagen Consensus Center, the prominent climate economist Professor Richard Tol, who has been a contributing, lead, principal, and convening author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, did the sums. A high global CO2 tax starting at $68 could reduce world economic output by a staggering 13 per cent in 2100 — the equivalent of $40 trillion a year. That is to say, it would cost 50 times the expected damage of global warming.
This research echoes the finding by an IPCC lead author for ‘Copenhagen Consensus 2008’, that if we spent $800 billion over the next 90 years solely on mitigating carbon emissions, we would rein in temperature increases by just 0.1°C by the end of this century.
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.
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