The closely watched ballot initiative to repeal AB32, California’s landmark global-warming emissions law, has seen the emergence of what may be, at least on the surface, an unlikely new coalition between corporations and advocates of emissions-control laws.

As Adam Werbach writes in Why Big Business Is Defending California’s Climate Regulations in the Atlantic, “an increasing number of the largest companies in the world are becoming active advocates for climate change legislation.” While there may be a number of reasons for this, Werbach says, the primary one is obvious: “The companies gathering together to defend the law are doing so for the same reason that corporations have banded together before. There’s money to be made.”

This echoes some of the points made by Bjorn Lomborg, director of the Copenhagen Consensus, a think tank, and author of “Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming” has made previously in the Wall Street Journal. “Some business leaders are cozying up with politicians and scientists to demand swift, drastic action on global warming,” Lomborg writes. “This is a new twist on a very old practice: companies using public policy to line their own pockets.”

Lomborg points out that this cozy corporate-climate relationship was pioneered by the likes of Enron, which bought up renewable energy companies and credit-trading outfits while boasting of its relationship with green interest groups. When the Kyoto Protocol was signed, an internal memo was sent within Enron that stated, “If implemented, [the Kyoto Protocol] will do more to promote Enron’s business than almost any other regulatory business.”

“The partnership among self-interested businesses, grandstanding politicians and alarmist campaigners truly is an unholy alliance,” Lomborg says. “The climate-industrial complex does not promote discussion on how to overcome this challenge in a way that will be best for everybody. We should not be surprised or impressed that those who stand to make a profit are among the loudest calling for politicians to act. Spending a fortune on global carbon regulations will benefit a few, but dearly cost everybody else.”

COOL IT, the documentary featuring Bjorn Lomborg, opens in theaters beginning November 12.

For more information about Bjorn Lombog and the Copenhagen Consensus, a think-tank based in Denmark that tells governments and philanthropists about the best ways to spend aid and development money, visit: Copenhagen Consensus and FixTheClimate.com.

Polar Bear on a canal

The polar bear floating down Amsterdam Canal is a real attention getter, but he’s not real. He’s part of an alternative media stunt to promote a TV show about climate change and how viewers can reduce their CO2 output. The ad agency behind the gag said the floating bear and his Eskimo guides “gained a lot of PR and helped viewership… If you think about the increasing CO2 and the melting polecaps, this could be reality in a lot of years from now.”

Bjorn Lomborg, who is featured in COOL IT, in a new documentary about climate change that opens November 12, says stunts like this are typical as polar bears have become emblematic of global warming. “I have no doubt that these people are well-meaning. They’ve certainly come up with a visually startling protest. Unfortunately – as I outline in COOL IT – the stunt is wrong-headed.”

What many people, most likely including those that snapped pictures from canal overpasses and nearby gondolas, don’t realize is that the polar bear population has risen dramatically, from about 5,000 in 1960 to around 22,000 today. “Though many expect that the polar bear will be threatened by global warming at some point in the future,” Lomborg says, “Kyoto-style carbon cuts implemented for the rest of the century would save less than one polar bear each year. The reduction in temperature is tiny, yet the worldwide cost would be in the region of $180 billion annually.”

Lomborg points out that more than 500 polar bears are shot each year. “The simple fact is that polar bears would stand a greater chance of avoiding extinction if people stopped shooting them than if we made expensive, short-term carbon cuts in their name.”

Writing in Investors Business Daily, Bjorn Lomborg asks: Why can’t we innovate our way to a carbon-free energy future?

“What if, instead of crippling economic growth by trying to make carbon-emitting fuels too expensive to use, we devoted ourselves to making green energy cheaper?” Lomborg asks.

“Right now, solar panels are so expensive — about 10 times as much as fossil fuels in terms of cost per unit of energy output — that only well-heeled, well-meaning (and, usually, well-subsidized) Westerners can afford to install them. But think where we’d be if we could improve the efficiency of solar cells by a factor of 10 — in other words, if we could make them cheaper than fossil fuels. We wouldn’t have to force (or subsidize) anyone to stop burning coal and oil. Everyone, including the Chinese and the Indians, would shift to the cheaper and cleaner alternatives.

This is why I have long urged policymakers to significantly increase the amount of money we invest in green energy R&D. As the Breakthrough Institute, a progressive think tank, has pointed out, we didn’t promote the invention of computers by taxing slide rules or restricting the supply of typewriters. We did it by investing massively in R&D.

In research published by the Copenhagen Consensus Center, Isabel Galiana and Chris Green of McGill University found that devoting just 0.2% of global gross domestic product — roughly $100 billion a year — to green energy R&D would produce the kind of game-changing breakthroughs needed to fuel a carbon-free future.”

COOL IT, the documentary featuring Bjorn Lomborg, opens in theaters beginning November 12.

For more information about Bjorn Lombog and the Copenhagen Consensus, a think-tank based in Denmark that tells governments and philanthropists about the best ways to spend aid and development money, visit: Copenhagen Consensus and FixTheClimate.com.

Myth: If all countries had signed and enacted the 1997 Kyoto treaty to reduce emissions, the world could have stopped global warming.

Reality: If we had spent that money, Kyoto would have cost about $180 billion a year. The reduction in temperature would have been about 0.008 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century. We’ve been doing climate change policy in the same failed way over and over. It’s about time that we realize the current approach is broken.

Myth: The environment is going to hell, right?

Reality: There are actually a lot of things that are getting better. It doesn’t mean that there are no problems. But it means that we should stop thinking we live on a doomed planet. This is a place where we in general leave the next generation in a better state rather than in a worse state. Hopefully it means that we can be much more rational and cool in our approach to Climate Change solutions.

Myth: Any climate policy is better than no climate policy.

Reality: We shouldn’t just solve a problem if the cost of the solving that will be even greater than the problem itself. Millions of people are dying every year due to malnutrition and other problems we can and must fix now. It is immoral to spending a lot of money on a poor solution to one problem. We should spend our money actually doing good, rather than trying to make ourselves feel good.

Here’s a climate-change themed art contest we think has the right idea… the CoolClimate Art Contest on DeviantArt searched for  ”the brightest and most creative visions that challenge and engage people around the issue of climate change… that generate iconic images that spurs participation in the climate change debate… from clean energy jobs to pollution-free oceans.”

No Pollution Please by Chris Lamprianidis

Writing in the Washington Post op-ed section, Bjorn Lomborg, author of COOL IT, proposes we attack threats like climate change from a more sensible direction. He suggests we look at it this way…

“Global warming will claim lives in another way: by increasing the number of people at risk of catching malaria by about 3 percent over this century. According to scientific models, implementing the Kyoto Protocol for the rest of this century would reduce the malaria risk by just 0.2 percent. On the other hand, we could spend $3 billion annually — 2 percent of the protocol’s cost — on mosquito nets and medication and cut malaria incidence almost in half within a decade.”

To significantly reduce the cost of cutting emissions Lomborg proposes we “dramatically increase spending on research and development of low-carbon energy. Ideally, every nation should commit to spending 0.05 percent of its gross domestic product exploring non-carbon-emitting energy technologies, be they wind, wave or solar power, or capturing CO2emissions from power plants. This spending could add up to about $25 billion per year but would still be seven times cheaper than the Kyoto Protocol and would increase global R&D tenfold. All nations would be involved, yet the richer ones would pay the larger share.”

Lomborg reminds us that, finding solutions to climate change “will take the better part of a century and will require a political will spanning political parties, continents and generations.” And in order to get there, “we really need to cool our debate.”

Read “Chill out. Stop fighting over global warming — here’s the smart way to attack it.” by Bjorn Lomborg here.

COOL IT, the documentary featuring Bjorn Lomborg, opens in theaters beginning November 12.

For more information about Bjorn Lombog and the Copenhagen Consensus, a think-tank based in Denmark that tells governments and philanthropists about the best ways to spend aid and development money, visit: Copenhagen Consensus and FixTheClimate.com.

“A lot of people ask me, ‘what can I do that will make a big difference to climate change’? And there really is only one thing. That is to get out there and spread the word about the solutions that will make a difference. You and I need to elect people who acknowledge that global warming is a problem – but who also recognize that research and development is what is going to solve this problem.” — Bjorn Lomborg.

So, just what are the solutions that will make a difference? In COOL IT, Lomborg discusses his work with a group of top-level economists, including 4 Nobel laureates, at the 2004 Copenhagen Consensus, which resulted in a Global Priority List based on return on investment. The Global Priority List is weighted by Opportunities (Very good, Good, Fair, Bad) and how much good can be done per each dollar spent. The results:

Very Good Opportunities – Disease (HIV/AIDS, Malaria), Malnutrition (provide micronutrients), Subsidies & Trade.

Good Opportunities – Malnutrition (new agriculture tech), Sanitation & Water, Development (lower cost of starting new businesses).

Fair Opportunities – Migration (lower barrier for skilled workers), Malnutrition (reduce low birth weight), Disease (Scale up health services).

Bad Opportunities [each dollar would do less than a dollar’s worth of good] – Migration (guest workers for unskilled), Climate (optimal carbon tax, Kyoto protocol, value-at-risk carbon tax).

COOL IT, the documentary featuring Bjorn Lomborg, opens in theaters beginning November 12.

For more information about Bjorn Lombog and the Copenhagen Consensus, a think-tank based in Denmark that tells governments and philanthropists about the best ways to spend aid and development money, visit: Copenhagen Consensus and FixTheClimate.com.

Writing in The Daily Green blog, Jim DiPeso calls COOL IT a “must see” new movie. The new movie, he says, “is provocative—and not just for the sake of being provocative.”

Bjorn Lomborg, he says, charts a middle way between a climate change debate that has devolved into shouting between two extremes – one proclaiming imminent apocalypse, the other painting sugar-plum fantasies of a greening earth.

“Lomborg says a better approach would be pouring money into R&D to drive down the costs of solar energy, ocean wave power, 4th generation nukes, and biofuels produced from non-edible feedstocks, so that they can compete with oil and coal. Spend money on the unavoidable need to adapt to climate change already in the pipeline – better sea walls, for example.”

> Read the review here.