Cooling the Climate Change Debate
The question raised by Bjorn Lomborg’s Cool It, a new documentary about climate change, is why the scientific manner in which people have arrived at identifying the climate change problem hasn’t been extended to identifying climate change solutions.
It is true that the climate change debate hasn’t been very rational: on one hand, conservatives claim that the science isn’t certain, on the other, liberals talk about an impending worldwide apocalypse – complete with polar bears falling out of the sky.
The problem with such political maneuvering is that neither leads to productive policies. “If we only listen to worst case scenarios, that’s going to lead to the wrong public priorities,” says Lomborg in his documentary, aired recently at the Toronto International Film Festival. But to climate change skeptics, he also says that his project is not “a discussion of whether [anthropomorphic climate change] is happening.”
Instead, his message is calm, pragmatic and solution-oriented. Let’s suppose the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is right, that at least half of the rise in temperature over the last few decades has been caused by greenhouse gases emitted by humans. How can we tackle the problem in the most cost-effective way? Or, as Lomborg puts it: “how can we best spend our money, in the smartest possible way?”
In 2008, Lomborg had calculated that for every $1 spent on global warming initiatives, you would only get a social benefit of thirty cents back. You could save more lives, and create more good, by spending money on devastating problems like malaria, malnutrition and a lack of education, he argued. Lomborg was, then as now, castigated by many climate change scientists, many of whom said that he provided conservatives with an excuse to ignore the problem completely.
But his engrossing new two-hour documentary has an interesting new twist – if the world is going to insist on spending money on climate change initiatives, Lomborg proposes that we at least use the most cost-effective methods.
By his estimation, the EU will spend $250 billion a year by 2020 fulfilling its goal of reducing greenhouse gases to 20% below 1990 levels. Forget cap and trade, he says, there’s too much potential for corruption and special interest permit handouts. His alternate plan, given $250 billion a year, is as follows:
- $100 billion on clean energy R&D for developing cleaner sources of energy
- $50 billion on adaptive technologies to mitigate the effects of climate change
- $1 billion on geo-engineering as an insurance policy for worst-case scenarios
- With the leftover funds used to address other social problems such as world poverty, hunger, and disease
Gone are the avenues of climate change R&D that environmentalists traditionally cite. Solar and wind power are inefficient – they should make way for cutting age concepts like water splitting, algae fuel and next generation nuclear reactors, Lomborg argues.
We can cool urban heat plume islands by painting roofs and roads white - $1 billion to paint and plant trees in Los Angeles would be enough to mitigate the effects of global warming there over the next century, the documentary claims.
And in the worst case scenario, if the direst projections are proven right, geo-engineering concepts like cloud whitening with stratospheric aerosol injectors should be developed.
The climate debate has been ruled by fear on both sides – fears that the world will end or that the shackles of environmental tyranny will bind. But even those who hope to do good have chosen to do pathetically impotent things.
It’s worth considering: is it better to feel good or do good? Any GHG emissions saved by turning off your room’s lights for Earth Hour are offset by the lighting of two candles. If every car in the United States was a Prius, it would only achieve 0.5% of the cut called for by Kyoto; if every florescent was changed for an eco-friendly bulb, it would only account for 0.2% of the cut. Adopting and enacting the Kyoto Protocol would save 1 polar bear a year – but humans shoot 300-500 a year.
Bjorn Lomborg is a refreshing, independent voice, an island of sanity among a sea of either extremism or apathy. Lomborg has often been accused of being a conservative – indeed, his audiences and hosts often are – but that doesn’t square with his willingness to spend $250 billion of public funds a year on social problems.“There’s not much real estate in the middle,” Lomborg said at the Heritage Foundation’s screening of his documentary this week. “There are people who have felt homeless in the middle.”
If you want facts, if you want smart thinking – go grab a copy of Lomborg’s Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming, and watch out for his documentary, coming soon to a theater near you.
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