Global warming – are we doing the right thing?
By Bjørn Lomborg, Ph.D., associate professor at the Department of Political Science,
University of Aarhus, Denmark
“Global warming is important, environmentally, politically and economically. There is no doubt that mankind has influenced and is still increasing atmospheric concentrations of CO2 and that this will increase temperature.”
“However, global warming will have serious costs – the total cost is estimated at about $5 trillion. Such estimates are unavoidably uncertain but derive from models assessing the cost of global warming to a wide variety of societal areas such as agriculture, forestry, fisheries, energy, water supply, infrastructure, hurricane damage, drought damage, coast protection, land loss caused by a rise in sea level, loss of wetlands, forest loss, loss of species, loss of human life, pollution and migration. The consequences of global warming will hit hardest on the developing countries, whereas the industrialized countries may actually benefit from a warming lower than 2-3ºC. The developing countries are harder hit primarily because they are poor – giving them less adaptive capacity.”
“Despite our intuition that we naturally need to do something drastic about such a costly global warming, we should not implement a cure that is actually more costly than the original affliction. Here, economic analyses clearly show that it will be far more expensive to cut CO2 emissions radically, than to pay the costs of adaptation to the increased temperatures.”
“If Kyoto is implemented with anything but global emissions trading – a scheme which seems utterly unattainable, and was not at all addressed in Bonn – it will not only be almost inconsequential for the climate, but it will also constitute a poor use of resources. The cost of such a Kyoto pact if implemented, just for the US, will be higher than the cost of solving the single most pressing problem for the world – providing the entire world with clean drinking water and sanitation. It is estimated that the latter would avoid 2 million deaths every year and prevent half a billion people becoming seriously ill each year. If no trading mechanism is implemented for Kyoto, the costs could approach $1 trillion, or almost five times the cost of world-wide water and sanitation coverage. For comparison, the total global aid today is about $50 billion annually. If we were to go even further – as suggested by many – and curb global emissions to the 1990 level, the net cost to the world would seriously escalate to about $4 trillion extra – comparable almost to the cost of global warming itself. Likewise, a temperature increase limit would cost anywhere from $3 to $33 trillion extra.”
“This emphasizes that we need to be very careful in our willingness to act on global warming.
Basically, global warming will be expensive ($5 trillion) and there is very little good we can do about it. Even if we were to handle global warming optimally which would mean cutting emissions a little fairly far into the future, we can only cut the cost very little (about $0.3 trillion). However, if we choose to enact Kyoto or even more ambitious programmes, the world will lose. And this conclusion does not just come from the output from a single model. Almost all the major computer models agree that even when chaotic consequences have been taken into consideration “it is striking that the optimal policy involves little emissions reduction below uncontrolled rates until the middle of the [twenty-first] century at the earliest.” So is it not curious, then, that the typical reporting on global warming tells us all the bad things that could happen from CO2 emissions, but few or none of the bad things that could come from overly zealous regulation of such emissions? Indeed, why is it that global warming is not discussed with an open attitude, carefully attuned to avoid making big and costly mistakes to be paid for by our descendants, but rather with a fervor more fitting for preachers of opposing religions?
This is an indication that the discussion of global warming is not just a question of choosing the optimal economic path for humanity, but has much deeper, political roots as to what kind of future society we would like.”
"Thus, the important lesson of the global warming debate is fivefold. First, we have to realize what we are arguing about – do we want to handle global warming in the most efficient way or do we want to use global warming as a stepping stone to other political projects? Before we make this clear to ourselves and others, the debate will continue to be muddled. Personally, I believe that in order to think clearly we should try to the utmost to separate issues, not the least because trying to solve all problems at one go may likely result in making bad solutions for all areas. Thus, I try to address just the issue of global warming.
Second, we should not spend vast amounts of money to cut a tiny slice of the global temperature increase when this constitutes a poor use of resources and when we could probably use these funds far more effectively in the developing world. This connection between resource use on global warming and aiding the Third World actually goes much deeper, because the developing world will experience by far the most damage from global warming. Thus, when we spend resources to mitigate global warming we are in fact and to a large extent helping future inhabitants in the developing world.
However, if we spend the same money directly in the Third World we would be helping present inhabitants in the developing world, and through them also their descendants. Since the inhabitants of the Third World are likely to be much richer in the future, and since the return on investments in the developing countries is much higher than those on global warming (about 16 percent to 2 percent), the question really boils down to: Do we want to help more well-off inhabitants in the Third World a hundred years from now a little or do we want to help poorer inhabitants in the present Third World much more? To give a feel for the size of the problem – the Kyoto Protocol will likely cost at least $150 billion a year, and possibly much more. UNICEF estimates that just $70-80 billion a year could give all Third World inhabitants access to the basics like health, education, water and sanitation. More important still is the fact that if we could muster such a massive investment in the present-day developing countries this would also give them a much better future position in terms of resources and infrastructure from which to manage a future global warming.
Third, we should realize that the cost of global warming will be substantial – about $5 trillion. Since cutting back CO2 emissions quickly turns very costly and easily counterproductive, we should focus more of our effort at finding ways of easing the emission of greenhouse gases over the long run. Partly, this means that we need to invest much more in research and development of solar power, fusion and other likely power sources of the future. Given a current US investment in renewable energy research and development of just $200 million, a considerable increase would seem a promising investment to achieve a possible conversion to renewable energy towards the latter part of the century. Partly, this
also means that we should be much more open towards other techno-fixes (so-called geoengineering). These suggestions range from fertilizing the ocean (making more algae bind carbon when they die and fall to the ocean floor) and putting sulfur particles into the stratosphere (cooling the earth) to capturing CO2 from fossil fuel use and returning it to storage in geological formations. Again, if one of these approaches could indeed mitigate (part of) CO2 emissions or global warming, this would be of tremendous value to the world. Fourth, we ought to have a look at the cost of global warming in relation to the total world economy. Analysis shows that even if we should choose some of the most inefficient programs to cut carbon emissions, the costs will at most defer growth a couple of years in the middle of the century. Global warming is in this respect still a limited and manageable problem."
"Finally, this also underscores that global warming is not anywhere the most important problem in the world. What matters is making the developing countries rich and allowing the citizens of developed countries even greater opportunities.”
The Global warming is for sure a concern for the whole world. It has scientific, economical and mankind effects which must be interiorised by all of us. We live in the same ship called earth, those who travel in the first class with all conditions, should be aware that if the ship fails all of the passengers will suffer the same consequences, whatever ones seat in the ship, be it first second or third class.
Regards
Luis
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