Zeev's Turnips Talk Politics (ZTTP)

[fuagf]

Bjorn Lomborg and global warming: Part 1
May 6, 2:43 PM

I talked this morning with Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It. He was using a hands-free phone while driving in Los Angeles, and his GPS navigator kept interrupting with polite suggestions for his next turn. Lomborg is in Los Angeles making a movie—sort of a response to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.

If global climate change was a more normal political issue, Lomborg would be classed as a centrist, a moderate who is trying to bring political consensus on positive action to address climate change. But global climate change is not normal, and his views, instead of bringing praise from both sides, have brought criticism. But more about that later.

Make Fossil Fuels More Expensive, or Green Fuels Irresistible?

“I love this thought—it comes from the Breakthrough Institute. Basically, the idea is that everyone seems to be trying to make fossil fuels so expensive that we won’t use them. But that’s never going to happen. So why don’t we try to make green energy so cheap that everyone will want to use it?”

After three books and the creation of the Copenhagen Consensus Center (which looks at prioritizing the problems the world faces and organising an intelligent response to them) Lomborg's goals for the next five years are fairly simple, and familiar, which is slightly depressing as it means there hasn't been much progress since they were expounded in his 2007 book, Cool It. “My main point is to make sure that we don’t just do something that makes us feel good, but that we do something that actually does good."

"There is a lot of conversation right now about what we should do about global warming, and promises of cutting CO2 by 20%, 40%, 80% abound. The problem in many ways is, it’s not going to happen. We have tried this many times and we have not done so, and just promising to do so is not going to fix the problem. So I hope to get people to realize sooner rather than later that if you’re actually going to make this happen, we need to make sure that we do much more of the smart things to deal with climate change, instead of promising things that won’t happen. We should try to make sure that we invest in research and development, so that we actually get new opportunities, so that we get even cheaper solar panels, that will actually make it possible to cut carbon emissions dramatically by the end of this century.”

Should We Rush to Judgment or Invest in the Future?

"The risk is that instead of making better solar panels, better windmills, better ocean generating systems, so that everybody can afford to buy them, including the Chinese, and will want to buy them, there’s huge pressure to buy existing technology and put it up today. Using existing solar panels makes us feel good, it makes for great photo ops, but actually does very little to make sure we will cut our future emissions. My favourite example is Germany, which has put up the most solar panels in the world and, there’s nothing wrong with Germany doing that, but it’s a very expensive way of generating very little energy and essentially Germany is going to be paying about $150 billion to postpone global warming by the end of the century by one hour. I don’t see the logic of that argument. Instead of paying that amount of money to make Germans feel good about themselves, we should be paying to get better solar panels so that everyone, including India, will want to put up cheap, available solar panels by, say, 2030.”

"We should spend vastly more on research and development. The depressing thing is that everybody talks about green energy, but everybody thinks that means putting up windmills. Putting up very specific windmills. My point is if you actually want to do good, it’s not about putting up windmills that are, even now, inefficient, it’s about putting up windmills in the future that are so efficient that everybody will want one. That is actually a lot cheaper than what many people are arguing that we should be doing right now, and that kind of research and development is much cheaper and much more efficient in the long run. What the Copenhagen Consensus showed was that with every dollar you invest in very quick CO2 cuts, you probably do less than a dollar’s worth of good and if you take into account what kind of policy measures come up, it might be as low as 4 cents for every dollar, whereas if you invest in research and development that is bringing better technology for the future, you can end up doing as much as $16 worth of good for every dollar invested. My basic point is that I’d much rather do $16 worth of good rather than 4 cents.”

Part 2 of this interview covers Lomborg's opinions on American politics regarding climate change
and his feelings towards those who are on the other side of the fence. It can be found here.
http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-9111-SF-Environmental-Policy-Examiner~y2009m5d6-Bjorn-Lomborg-Interview-Part-2-Global-warming-politics-and-assessing-his-critics

http://www.examiner.com/x-9111-SF-Environmental-Policy-Examiner~y2009m5d6-Bjorn-Lomborg-and-global-warming-Part-1
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Posted by: fuagf Date: Saturday, August 02, 2008
tlc, a couple of days ago i saw an interview with, Bjorn Lomborg, new to me and a skeptic of popular environmental
policies .. he sees the climate debate as neither a hoax nor a great catastrophe .. speaks of cost-benefit as policy
approach and is not a great fan of alternate fuel and carbon-emission as the best way to go .
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?Message_id=31176303&txt2find=lomborg