(no subject)
Today I read a review of Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming. The author of the book, Bjorn Lomborg, is definitely not a supporter of the conventional environmentalist wisdom. However, in his arguments for "do-good" strategies in place of the "feel-good" approach we are taking seem fairly cogent.
The lesson... is not that global warming is a trivial problem. Although Dr. Lomborg believes its dangers have been hyped, he agrees that global warming is real and will do more harm than good. He advocates a carbon tax and a treaty forcing nations to budget hefty increases for research into low-carbon energy technologies.
But the best strategy, he says, is to make the rest of the world as rich as New York, so that people elsewhere can afford to do things like shore up their coastlines and buy air conditioners. He calls Kyoto-style treaties to cut greenhouse-gas emissions a mistake because they cost too much and do too little too late. Even if the United States were to join in the Kyoto treaty, he notes, the cuts in emissions would merely postpone the projected rise in sea level by four years: from 2100 to 2104.
“We could spend all that money to cut emissions and end up with more land flooded next century because people would be poorer,” Dr. Lomborg said as we surveyed Manhattan’s expanded shoreline. “Wealth is a more important factor than sea-level rise in protecting you from the sea. You can draw maps showing 100 million people flooded out of their homes from global warming, but look at what’s happened here in New York. It’s the same story in Denmark and Holland - we’ve been gaining land as the sea rises.”
...
If you’re worried about stronger hurricanes flooding coasts, he says, concentrate on limiting coastal development and expanding wetlands right now rather than trying to slightly delay warming decades from now. To give urbanites a break from hotter summers, concentrate on reducing the urban-heat-island effect. If cities planted more greenery and painted roofs and streets white, he says, they could more than offset the impact of global warming.
The biggest limitation to his cost-benefit analyses is that no one knows exactly what global warming will produce. It may not be worth taking expensive steps to forestall a one-foot rise in the sea level, but what if the seas rise much higher? Dr. Lomborg’s critics argue that we owe it to future generations to prepare for the worst-case projections.
But preparing for the worst in future climate is expensive, which means less money for the most serious threats today - and later this century. You can imagine plenty of worst-case projections that have nothing to do with climate change, as Dr. Lomborg reminded me at the end of our expedition.
“No historian would look back at the last two centuries and rank the rising sea level here as one of the city’s major problems,” he said, sitting safely dry and cool inside the Bridge Cafe. “I don’t think our descendants will thank us for leaving them poorer and less healthy just so we could do a little bit to slow global warming. I’d rather we were remembered for solving the other problems first.”
I can't offer much of an opinion about the quantitative justification of Lomborg's arguments, but his points are interesting.
The world's poorest countries are the ones that will suffer from climate change; everyone else will probably manage. But poor countries can't simply become wealthy at will; many are where they are because of specific political and cultural blocks to improvement. Bangladesh, for instance, is an isolated Muslim hinterland that was shaved off from urban India in 1947. For political reasons, the country is socially and economically disconnected with its nearest neighbors. No wonder it's a disaster.
The problems of countries like Bangladesh, and the problems they will continue to suffer due to climate change, are policy failures first and foremost. That may sound outrageous, but I'm talking about international as well as national failures. A college professor of mine once said that a drought is an act of God, but a famine is a failure of government. You could say the same thing about hurricanes: the storm is a thing of nature, and it is only destructive because of our bad choices about how and where to live. The same is even true about earthquakes. The Kobe earthquake in 1995 killed 5,500 people; however, Kobe is a huge city, and the toll would have been much worse if the Japanese government didn't plan building codes for this kind of event. Had the earthquake occurred in Pakistan, hundreds of thousands would have been killed.
The point is that the issue of climate change is political rather than environmental. This is actually bad news, because shaving a few points off our greenhouse gas emissions is the easy part. It's just an empty gesture if we are to avoid the really destructive human toll of climate change, which will only exacerbate the problems of our global political and economic system. The structural weaknesses in this system are the "policy failures" we need to address.
The lesson... is not that global warming is a trivial problem. Although Dr. Lomborg believes its dangers have been hyped, he agrees that global warming is real and will do more harm than good. He advocates a carbon tax and a treaty forcing nations to budget hefty increases for research into low-carbon energy technologies.
But the best strategy, he says, is to make the rest of the world as rich as New York, so that people elsewhere can afford to do things like shore up their coastlines and buy air conditioners. He calls Kyoto-style treaties to cut greenhouse-gas emissions a mistake because they cost too much and do too little too late. Even if the United States were to join in the Kyoto treaty, he notes, the cuts in emissions would merely postpone the projected rise in sea level by four years: from 2100 to 2104.
“We could spend all that money to cut emissions and end up with more land flooded next century because people would be poorer,” Dr. Lomborg said as we surveyed Manhattan’s expanded shoreline. “Wealth is a more important factor than sea-level rise in protecting you from the sea. You can draw maps showing 100 million people flooded out of their homes from global warming, but look at what’s happened here in New York. It’s the same story in Denmark and Holland - we’ve been gaining land as the sea rises.”
...
If you’re worried about stronger hurricanes flooding coasts, he says, concentrate on limiting coastal development and expanding wetlands right now rather than trying to slightly delay warming decades from now. To give urbanites a break from hotter summers, concentrate on reducing the urban-heat-island effect. If cities planted more greenery and painted roofs and streets white, he says, they could more than offset the impact of global warming.
The biggest limitation to his cost-benefit analyses is that no one knows exactly what global warming will produce. It may not be worth taking expensive steps to forestall a one-foot rise in the sea level, but what if the seas rise much higher? Dr. Lomborg’s critics argue that we owe it to future generations to prepare for the worst-case projections.
But preparing for the worst in future climate is expensive, which means less money for the most serious threats today - and later this century. You can imagine plenty of worst-case projections that have nothing to do with climate change, as Dr. Lomborg reminded me at the end of our expedition.
“No historian would look back at the last two centuries and rank the rising sea level here as one of the city’s major problems,” he said, sitting safely dry and cool inside the Bridge Cafe. “I don’t think our descendants will thank us for leaving them poorer and less healthy just so we could do a little bit to slow global warming. I’d rather we were remembered for solving the other problems first.”
I can't offer much of an opinion about the quantitative justification of Lomborg's arguments, but his points are interesting.
The world's poorest countries are the ones that will suffer from climate change; everyone else will probably manage. But poor countries can't simply become wealthy at will; many are where they are because of specific political and cultural blocks to improvement. Bangladesh, for instance, is an isolated Muslim hinterland that was shaved off from urban India in 1947. For political reasons, the country is socially and economically disconnected with its nearest neighbors. No wonder it's a disaster.
The problems of countries like Bangladesh, and the problems they will continue to suffer due to climate change, are policy failures first and foremost. That may sound outrageous, but I'm talking about international as well as national failures. A college professor of mine once said that a drought is an act of God, but a famine is a failure of government. You could say the same thing about hurricanes: the storm is a thing of nature, and it is only destructive because of our bad choices about how and where to live. The same is even true about earthquakes. The Kobe earthquake in 1995 killed 5,500 people; however, Kobe is a huge city, and the toll would have been much worse if the Japanese government didn't plan building codes for this kind of event. Had the earthquake occurred in Pakistan, hundreds of thousands would have been killed.
The point is that the issue of climate change is political rather than environmental. This is actually bad news, because shaving a few points off our greenhouse gas emissions is the easy part. It's just an empty gesture if we are to avoid the really destructive human toll of climate change, which will only exacerbate the problems of our global political and economic system. The structural weaknesses in this system are the "policy failures" we need to address.