Intense focus on cutting emissions is dumb argues Lomborg

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The quality and range of the free lectures at the LSE is hard to beat and half term has given me the chance to pop into several this week. I attended a public seminar on climate change at the London School of Economics last night where the principal speaker was the Skepical Environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg - adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School.

Once this guy gets going he is difficult to hold back! A relentless delivery was tough to stay with after a busy day in London. I have heard Bjorn Lomborg before and didn’t learn too much that was fresh but it was useful once more to draw a contrarian view on the intense policy focus on cutting C02 emissions as the centre-piece of environmental policy. His new film “Cool It” is released in the UK next month (March 2011) and will no doubt stoke fresh media interest.

Lomborg asks a central question in nearly all of his talks and articles - namely where to spend money to do the most good when the budget is finite.

His main theme is that the opportunity cost of hundreds of billions of pounds, euros and dollars spent on achieving small reductions in forecast temperature changes (and the associated environmental impacts) is huge. He is not a climate change denier - his early remarks state that climate change is real and it is man made and the likely temperature change by 2100 is 2.6 per cent and the probable cost of global warming is $15 trillion but he argue that the consequences for mankind are vastly exaggerated, one sided and lead to bad judgements.

His talk picked out four central issues

1/ Heat deaths

Higher average temperatures will bring higher mortality in many countries (including the UK) but less attention tends to be given to fewer people dying from extreme cold - in developed nations for example, perhaps ten times more people will survive because of less extreme cold temperatures. The impact will be skewed though - higher average temperatures will have a much bigger impact on death rates in the world’s poorest countries.

Lomborg believes that there are better policies against heat waves than simply cutting emissions - his rather trite suggestion is to spend money giving people air conditioning (and adding to emissions!). But he is on firmer ground in wanting investment in innovations to make cities cooler by adding more water and greenery. Smart architecture is something that the RSA has been focusing on in some of their recent events. Here is an example - Anthills to Labyrinths – Engineering Sustainable Architecture

2/ Sea level rise

Not a catastrophe according to Lomborg - average sea temperatures are likely to rise by around 30cm (actually the IPCC said they couldn’t rule out higher values for sea level changes) .... The same 30cm change has happened over the last 150 years. For less than 0.05per cent of their GDP the Maldives could adapt to this and save 99 per cent of their existing dry land.

3/ Hurricanes - risk of frequent hurricanes and economic costs associated with the impact

Hurricane damage has little to do with climate change the economic damage from them has more to do with rising prosperity causing people to move towards areas where hurricanes are most likely to hit. In short, there has been a population shift towards exposed areas and it is more important to focus spending and resources on reducing social vulnerability in areas where hurricanes hit rather than just targeting cuts in emissions

4/ More malaria from heat

Malaria is weakly correlated to heat but strongly correlated to wealth. Should we focus on temperature or treatment? Investment in malaria specific policies would save vastly more lives

Lomborg argues for smarter policy options needed for tackling climate change. The original Kyoto Protocol offered high costs and negligible benefits and the EU target of cutting emissions by 20% from their baseline by 2020 involving schemes such as EU carbon emissions comes at a cost of about 250 billion dollars annually for a 0.05 centigrade saving by 2100. Each dollar spent on cutting emissions will avoid 3 cents of climate change

He argues that we ought to innovate down the price of renewable energy rather than tax to raise the price of fossil fuels using carbon taxes - this spurt to innovation might come for example through a step change in state-funded research and development in non carbon emitting technologies or perhaps the expansion of patent boxes - lower business taxes on the profits that come from patented low carbon technologies.

One comes away from Bjorn Lomborg talks believing that any money spent on carbon reduction policies and adaptation to climate change is a scandalous waste of money - I am not sure his position is anywhere near as extreme or narrow minded as this.

In a well focused response to the Lomborg talk, Dimitri Zenghelis (Senior Visiting Fellow at the Grantham Research Institute at the LSE) claimed that Bjorn Lomborg is arguing for mopping up water while leaving the tap running. (cf the continued growth of C02 emissions). And that the original Stern Report was wrong, it has underestimated the likely impact and cost of climate change so that the consequences of ‘business as usual’ are an underestimate of projections made when the Stern Review was published in 2006.

Zhengelis claimed that Lomborg’s prescription for essentially backing away from conventional policies for carbon reduction would take us to 7 degrees centigrade of global warming and perhaps then most bets are off as to the consequences for future generations. There is an opportunity to hear more from this side of the climate policy debate when Lord Stern lectures at the LSE in mid-March.

Suggested reading:

Climate change raises flood risk, researchers say (BBC news)

Global warming talks just hot air? (BBC news)

RSA President’s Lecture 2010

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