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In Newsweek XX.XX 2009

Making the Right Choices on the Climate

By Bjorn Lomborg

When world leaders meet for the major summit in Copenhagen this December, they will make decisions that will affect the world for generations. Just three months before that crucial meeting, there is an alarming absence of serious discussion about what decisions they should make.

Indeed, ‘global warming’ and ‘sensible policy discussion’ hardly seem to fit in the same sentence. What passes for debate is usually a frenzied, deafening fight between those who believe that climate change is not real, and those who believe that it will end life on Earth. We are all, it seems, either ‘deniers’ or ‘believers’.

The careful work of mainstream climate change scientists shows that human activity is warming the planet. I have made that point for more than a decade. But they have also shown that many of the most alarming scenarios depicted in movies and the media are simply unlikely to pass.

Moreover, the only policy on offer seems to be one of rich nations making carbon cuts – the bigger, the better. Abundant analyses show that this approach has failed in the past and is likely to fail again. Other policies have much greater promise. Do we not owe it to future generations to make the smartest decisions we can?

Climate economist Professor has analyzed the benefits and costs of grand promises of drastic, immediate carbon cuts. An example would be the call for 80% carbon reductions by mid‐century that many lobbyists urge. Tol shows that this is an incredibly expensive way of doing very little good.

All the academic models show that using carbon cuts to limit the increase in global temperature to 2oC, as promised by the European Union and the G‐8, would either be impossible, or would cost a phenomenal 12.9% of GDP by the end of the century – $40 trillion a year, or more than $4,000 for every person, every year, by the end of the century. Yet, the avoided climate damage across the entire century would be worth just $1.1 trillion. Put bluntly, this cure is dramatically more painful than the illness.

Tol’s research is one of a series of papers commissioned by the Copenhagen Consensus Center to explore the benefits and costs of different responses to global warming. This week, Nobel laureate economists will consider the research and identify the smartest policy choices.

To me, two options stand out. One possibility is making a small investment in . The most comprehensive study of the costs and benefits of this approach, by Professor Eric Bickel and Lee Lane, shows that small amounts of money may be able to reduce as much of global warming’s effects as hundreds of trillions of dollars spent on carbon emission reductions. COPENHAGENCOPENHAGENCOPENHAGEN CONSENSUS CONSENSUS CONSENSUS ON ON ON CLIMATE CLIMATE CLIMATE

Automated boats could spray seawater into the air to make clouds whiter, and thus more reflective – augmenting a natural process. Bouncing just one or two percent of the total sunlight that strikes the Earth back into space could cancel out as much warming as that caused by doubling pre‐industrial levels of greenhouse gases.

Spending about $9 billion researching and developing this technology could end up avoiding about $20 trillion of climate damage. To put this in context, the US annual budget on climate research is $6 billion a year – for just eighteen months worth of this spending, we could entirely avoid all of the 21st century temperature rise. It is important to discuss the ethics and ramifications of this approach, but we should welcome the possibility of a cheap, effective response to global warming.

Another option is a global agreement on investment in research and development of non‐carbon based technology. To reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, we need much more CO2‐free energy – in fact, an increase of many hundreds of times today’s level of green technology like wind and solar. Professor Chris Green and Isabel Galiana look at the state of non‐carbon based energy today and calculate that alternative energy sources would get us only a tiny fraction of the way toward carbon stabilization by 2100. The technology is not reliable, scalable or cheap enough to replace fossil fuels any time in the foreseeable future.

Investing about $100 billion annually in this research would mean that we could essentially fix climate change within a century or so, with every invested dollar avoiding about $11 of climate damage. What happens if we don’t make this investment? The researchers show that more carbon reduction promises without a wholesale technological revolution will mean we cannot cut emissions by much at all. We won’t avoid temperature rises and carbon taxes will simply hurt growth and prosperity.

The biggest risk now is that the politicians in Copenhagen will continue blindly following a hugely expensive response to global warming that fails to reduce suffering.

It is time to challenge the orthodoxy of a policy dominated by carbon cuts, and start talking about smarter responses to global warming.

Bjorn Lomborg is Director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, author of Cool It and The Skeptical Environmentalist, and Adjunct Professor at Copenhagen Business School.