This opinion piece by Bjørn Lomborg was published by the Wall Street Journal on November 12, 2010.

This time a year ago, passionate climate activists told us that we had just weeks left to save the planet. The looming Copenhagen climate change summit in December 2009 was, they claimed, our “last chance” to avert catastrophic global warming.

How things change. We are now just weeks ahead of this year’s United Nations climate change summit in Cancun, Mexico, yet few people would be presumptuous enough to believe that the gathering will make any real difference to rising temperatures. Copenhagen’s failure dashed hopes of any comprehensive agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions. After flocking to last year’s meeting and being embarrassed, most global leaders will steer clear of Cancun.

Yet, some things stay depressingly the same. Attendees in Cancun will be singing the same tune that they did last year: Nations must commit themselves to drastic, immediate carbon cuts. This ignores both economic reality and 20 years of experience that tell us that this policy choice is incredibly expensive, utterly ineffective and ultimately politically unsellable.

How did we get to the point where we have fixated on a response to climate change that would do so little good for such a high cost? This goes back much further than last year’s summit in Copenhagen.

Many environmental activists blame so-called “deniers” for halting action on global warming. It is true that the heated discussion about the reality of global warming has created more heat than illumination—and that it has distracted us from having a constructive discussion about the best policy response to global warming.

But environmental activists themselves must accept responsibility for helping block sensible solutions to global warming. They have engaged in alarmist rhetoric and ignored the economic science that shows that carbon cuts are a deeply flawed policy response.

Nearly 20 years after the so-called Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro (which produced the first international agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions), no leading industrialized power will find the political will to impose the draconian carbon taxes or order the substantial carbon cuts it would take to markedly lower carbon emissions. This is for a very good reason.

Fully implementing the Kyoto Protocol—the last comprehensive carbon cut treaty that the world had—would have cost hundreds of billions every year in lost economic growth. And even if it had been fully implemented across the century—a far shot from what has actually happened—it would only have reduced temperatures by less than one-third of one degree Fahrenheit in 100 years.

The reason for this is that alternative energy technologies are far from ready to take over from fossil fuels. If green technology is not ready to take up the slack, then forcing carbon cuts through taxes will simply hurt growth and development—particularly painful to developing nations.

World-wide public spending on research and development for clean energy technologies is a paltry $2 billion a year. Increasing this to $100 billion a year could be a game-changer. Not only would it be almost twice as cheap as the $180 billion a year cost of fully implementing Kyoto, but the effect of this kind of spending would be hundreds of times greater. But this should not be our only response to global warming. We should also invest considerably more in adaptation to global warming’s effects, and research geo-engineering technologies as a potential backstop.

I was hopeful a year ago that Copenhagen’s failure might be a blessing in disguise, because policy makers might wake up to reality. Instead, it turns out that the chief lesson that they learned 12 months ago was to send bureaucrats rather than global leaders to Cancun in order to avoid another PR fiasco.

Mr. Lomborg is director of the Copenhagen Consensus, a think tank, and author of “Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming” (Knopf, 2007). His new film, “Cool It,” opens in U.S. theaters nationwide today.

In “Climate scientists plan campaign against global warming skeptics,” The Los Angeles Times reports: “Faced with rising political attacks, hundreds of climate scientists are joining a broad campaign to push back against congressional conservatives who have threatened prominent researchers with investigations and vowed to kill regulations to rein in man-made greenhouse gas emissions.”

Bjørn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, and subject of the new documentary film Cool It, offers the following response.

“I think that some scientists have learned the wrong lesson if they believe that they need to work on public relations and marketing strategies. Some influential scientists could certainly do better at explaining the science of global warming. But it is very worrying when we see climate scientists going further than that and resorting to alarmist rhetoric, worst-case scenarios, or underhand behavior to try to build a political case for drastic carbon cuts (which, as we outline in Cool It, are an incredibly ineffective, hugely expensive response to global warming).

To me, last year’s ‘Climategate’ scandal showed what happens when scientists go too far down this path. This was when a large number of emails between climate scientists were stolen and publicly released. These documents showed that a group of the world’s most influential climatologists were arguing, brainstorming, and plotting together to enforce what amounts to a party line on climate change. Data that didn’t support their assumptions about global warming were fudged. Experts who disagreed with their conclusions were denigrated as “idiots” and “garbage.” Peer-reviewed journals that dared to publish contrarian articles were threatened with boycotts. Dissent was stifled, facts were suppressed, scrutiny was blocked, and the free flow of information was choked off.

What those scientists were doing amounted to a highly political public relations campaign. Inevitably, the Climategate emails were seized on by skeptics of man-made climate change as “proof” that global warming is nothing more than a hoax. Global warming is not a hoax, but at a time when opinion polls have shown rising public skepticism about climate change, any such behavior could provide just the excuse too many people are waiting for to tune it all out.”

Common sense was an early loser in the scorching battle over the reality of man-made global warming, writes Bjorn Lomborg in his latest Project Syndicate column. For nearly 20 years, one group of activists argued – in the face of ever-mounting evidence—that global warming was a fabrication. Their opponents, meanwhile, exaggerated the phenomenon’s likely impact—and, as a consequence, dogmatically fixated on drastic, short-term carbon cuts as the only solution, despite overwhelming evidence that such cuts would be cripplingly expensive and woefully ineffective.

This scientific pie fight, characterized by juvenile name-calling, ignoble tactics, and intellectual intransigence on both sides, not only left the public confused and scared; it undermined the efforts of the most important organizations working on advancing the science of climate change. Almost inevitably, at international summits from Kyoto to Copenhagen, governments failed to take any meaningful action on global warming.

Fortunately, there finally seems to be a growing number of influential scientists, economists, and politicians who represent a more sensible approach to the issue.

As I argued in my 2007 book Cool It, the most rational response to global warming is to make alternative energy technologies so cheap that the whole world can afford them…

> Read the full column here.

Bjørn Lomborg is the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It, subject of the film Cool It (in theaters, November 12), and director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center.

Wired recently raised the controversial issue of geo-engineering in its online poll Should Geoengineering Go Forward? According to Wired: “Over the last few years, intentionally manipulating Earth’s climate on a planetary scale has gone from a fringe idea to a possibility debated by mainstream scientists. That’s worried a lot of people, and last week the practice was informally placed off-limits by 193 nations.”

Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, offers the following commentary on the subject.

“As Professor Roger Pielke Jr. points out in the documentary COOL IT, geo-engineering is as divisive within the climate change policy debate as stem-cell research is within health policy discussion. The prospect of deliberately changing the Earth’s atmosphere understandably arouses strong emotions and fears. However, I agree with President Obama’s science advisor, John Holdren, whose personal view is that geo-engineering has ‘got to be looked at.’

There are many obvious reasons to be cautious. But these are the very same reasons why we should research geo-engineering today so that we can better understand its possibilities, limitations and effects.

Research to date (including this excellent paper by Eric Bickel and Lee Lane for the Copenhagen Consensus Center) indicates that geo-engineering could be cheap and fast-acting compared to carbon cuts. Bickel and Lane showed that a tiny investment in climate engineering might be able to reduce as much of global warming’s effects as trillions of dollars spent on carbon emission reductions. Geo-engineering shows promise as a way of buying more time to make the technological breakthroughs that are needed to move away from reliance on fossil fuels.

It is important that we focus firmly on the costs and benefits of different ways of responding to climate change. We obviously need to act with caution. But that means making sure that we actually research potentially effective actions before we take them off the table.”

Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, answers the question “Where Will The Money Come From?” to support his approach to reducing the effects of Climate Change. Here is Bjorn’s video response…

> Where Will The Money Come From?

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 andFixTheClimate.com.

Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, says “people often ask me, What can I do about Global Warming?” Here is Bjorn’s video response…

> Bjorn Lomborg: What Can I Do About Global Warming?”

In an interview in the Washington Independent, Thomas Crocker revisits a concept he developed as an economics Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in the 1960s that has become one of the most innovative and controversial public policy proposals of our time: cap-and-trade. Cap-and-trade was used successfully in the 1990s to reduce sulfur dioxide emissions that caused acid rain, but Congress has been struggling for years to pass a similar program for greenhouse gas emissions.

Now, 45 years after he advocated the idea of shifting the design of pollution control efforts “from regulators to polluters and sufferers because they know more about what is happening and can happen to them,” Crocker says cap-and-trade is probably not the best way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Cap-and-trade, says Crocker, works better for traditional pollutants like sulfur dioxide, because “incremental emissions of SO2 do a great deal of damage. Whereas with respect to greenhouse gases, the marginal damages of an additional bit of greenhouse gas is not going to do much harm.”

It would make more sense to impose a flat tax on carbon dioxide, he argues. A carbon tax provides certainty with respect to pricing-it imposes a certain cost on carbon-but does not set a limit on how much carbon can be emitted across the economy. “I believe that emissions taxes for greenhouse gases are more economically efficient than is cap-and-trade.”

Bjorn Lomborg’s view is that neither cap-and-trade nor a carbon tax should be seen as the primary response to global warming.

“The argument between cap-and-trade and a carbon tax is effectively a fight about which cart we should put in front of the horse! We need to recognize that there is a massive technological challenge ahead of us. A high carbon tax or grandiose cap-and-trade scheme will only hurt growth if alternative technology is not ready, without making any real dent in global warming. Instead of constantly promising of emissions reductions, politicians need to work on the means to get there. That’s why we need to seriously invest in research and development.”

“Of course, one way to fund some of this R&D spending is with a tax—which as Thomas Crocker now recognizes is better than a cap-and-trade scheme. But the important thing here is to remember our bigger-picture goal, which is to reduce temperature rises. The best way to do that is to focus first on the technology we need.”

The Copenhagen Consensus Center offers advice to policymakers that follows on from the 21 research papers released by the Center during the summer of 2009, in which top economists outline different ways to respond to climate change.

For more information about Bjorn Lombog and the Copenhagen Consensus, visit:

http://www.copenhagenconsensus.com

http://fixtheclimate.com

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.”