A Climate Change Skeptic Switches Sides

Longtime climate change skeptic Bjorn Lomborg's call for more spending on low-carbon technology will help push forward a debate stuck in neutral since Copenhagen.

Environmentalists loathe Bjorn Lomborg, the famous “skeptical environmentalist.”

Like Red Sox fans loathe the Yankees. Like Republicans loathe trial lawyers. Like seemingly everyone loathes airline fees, insurance companies, and congressmen, not necessarily in that order.

Lomborg stirred the pot again the other day, but this time he made waves that splashed all over climate change skeptics. Lomborg appeared to drop his earlier insistence that addressing climate change would cost too much and accomplish too little, a stance that regularly incited paroxysms of temple throbbing in the green set.

The Danish statistician is about to publish a book, Smart Solutions to Climate Change, that will recommend spending $150 billion a year on low-carbon energy technology R&D and on climate change adaptation.

Rajenda Pachauri, the controversial head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, once likened Lomborg to Hitler. The very same Rajenda Pachauri gave Lomborg an attaboy publicity quote for the book launch.

Lomborg suggests a $7-per-metric-ton carbon tax to raise $250 billion per year, with 40 percent dedicated to researching R&D for nuclear, solar, and other low-carbon energy technologies, 20 percent on adaptation – higher sea walls, for example – and 39.6 percent to pay for development basics in impoverished countries – clean water, education, and health care.

That would leave $1 billion for researchers to dig into fending off climate change through geoengineering. One such idea is shooting tiny droplets of seawater into the sky to thicken up cloud layers so they reflect more solar heat back to space. Another is fertilizing the ocean to stir up a population explosion of carbon-hungry phytoplankton.

Lomborg told the Guardian in an August 30 interview that he got to thinking about geoengineering when considering the black swan circling the climate debate – the low-probability, high-consequence possibility that greenhouse gas emissions could cause the global climate system to shift into a dangerously unstable state, or “something really bad lurking around the corner,” as he put it. We ought to give geoengineering a serious look, he recommended, for insurance.

Geoengineering has long been the crazy uncle in the climate change policy debate. Environmentalists get the willies talking about it, out of a reasonable fear that wobbly politicians thinking no further ahead than the next election will embrace unproven techno-fixes that could set off dangerous unintended consequences.

Basic geoengineering questions are unresolved, such as who would be in charge of such projects, who would finance the work, and who would pay for damages in case of screw-ups. Like pulling down the shades over sunlight-dependent croplands.

In a 2009 policy statement, the American Meteorological Society drily described the potential for an international affray: “The consequences of reflecting sunlight would almost certainly not be the same for all nations and peoples, thus raising legal, ethical, diplomatic, and national security concerns.”

Lomborg acknowledged in the Guardian interview that geoengineering could result in “really bad stuff,” but that there is an “obligation to at least look at it.”

The meteorologists offered a geoengineering middle ground that wary greens and starry-eyed techno-optimists ought to consider:

Go ahead with the research, look closely for unintended consequences, consider the ethical questions, and do it in the open.

Don’t look at geoengineering as an easy substitute for reducing greenhouse gas emissions or adapting to climate change consequences already in the queue.

And make doubly sure that no one jumps the gun and starts shooting at the clouds before we know what the hell we’re doing.

Meanwhile, Lomborg’s recalibration of his climate change stance has added some spice to a global policy debate that has been stuck in neutral since the Copenhagen summit and the whole lotta nothin’ that it produced.

His ideas are worth a look, even from dyed-in-the-wool environmentalists who have little use for the “skeptical environmentalist.”