Book Review: Bjorn Lomborg: “False Alarm”
Bjorn Lomborg just released his latest book “False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts The Poor And Fails To Fix The Planet”.
The subtitle betrays any attempt at teasing you about the contents, so let’s just jump right in.
Lomborg has long been criticized as a “climate change denier”. This strikes me as rather odd, given that I have never seen an appearance of his, where he didn’t emphasize that climate change is real. So already in the introduction of “False Alarm”, he states “CLIMATE CHANGE IS REAL, it is caused predominately by carbon emissions from humans burning fossil fuels, and we should tackle it intelligently.” [LOMBORG, p.7]
What gets him into trouble is what follows next. “But to do that, we need to stop exaggerating, stop arguing that it is now or never, and stop thinking climate is the only thing that matters. Many climate campaigners go further than the science supports. They implicitly or even explicitly suggest that exaggeration is acceptable because the cause is so important.” [LOMBORG, p.7]
A lot of people do not support the second part of his assessment. In fact, he cites studies that find huge parts of the population actually believe that the world will end by 2030, if we do not “act now”. As a symbol of this “angst” he describes a picture of a girl holding a sign saying: “YOU’LL DIE OF OLD AGE I’LL DIE OF CLIMATE CHANGE”.
This deadline, artificial and arbitrary, has been cited by many climate change activists and even some legislators. Its origin is somewhat trivial and underwhelming. Scientists were asked to specify what the world would need to do to meet an arbitrary cut-off of 1.5°C temperature increase. Nothing special happens when that temperature is reached. They obliged and produced a report. “Simply put, politicians asked them what it would take to do the almost impossible, and the scientists responded that this would require almost impossible policies.” [LOMBORG, p.25]
The countdowns you have all heard about are not counting towards the end of the world, but towards an arbitrary, unbelievably ambitious goal. You will soon see just how ambitious it is.
Lomborg is borrowing from his vast experience of running the “Copenhagen Consensus Center”, where top economists rank the problems of the world like tuberculosis, malaria nets, education, access to contraceptives, etc. according to how much positive impact you can make by spending money on that cause, when he looks at the economics of climate change.
His method is of course not without its critics: compressing all available information into a dollar amount seems like “oversimplifying”, “denigrating” or “cold” to a lot of people, but that doesn’t change the fact that the impact of different policies and interventions, like climate policies can be measured and more importantly compared in terms of money.
In this frame of reference, climate change becomes a cost to human well-being. One among many. But, and this is probably where most critics are revolting, he also adds up the benefits of fossil fuel use to the equation. This drastically changes it.
Instead of being a singularly bad thing, the usage of fossil fuel can lift people in developing countries out of poverty, as it has done consistently through out its usage in now developed ones. Being richer buys better medical care, women’s rights, education, sanitation, communication, refrigeration, heating and so much more. Basically everything that makes living in developed nation comfortable – iPhones, cars, planes, TV, youtube – is running on fossil fuels. And there are a few billion of people that want that comfort, too.
For some reason, climate change has grabbed the public’s attention and become a heated topic, where news outlets regularly publish the most pessimistic of studies. Often without including crucial context and assumptions. Lomborg gives many examples of this phenomenon sprinkled throughout first half of his book.
One of the effects of climate change being of such special public concern is that politicians and political parties are increasingly using it as talking point and identity-establishing topic. It already is for a lot of their voters, who go vegan or refrain from having children “for the climate”.
Bold promises and to a lesser degree actual policies seem like the natural result of this. And in the realm of climate politics nothing has been grander and bolder than the Paris Climate Agreement.
In the Paris Climate Agreement developed nations pledged to spend on the order of $US1-2 trillion per year. To put that into perspective, it’s “two to five times the total amount of the world’s previously most expensive global accord: Germany’s World War I repayment settled in the Versailles Treaty.” [LOMBORG, p.116]. Annually!
WOW! That must really be a game changer, right?!
“The United Nations organizers of the Paris Agreement once in 2015 (and never since) released an estimate of the total maximum impact of all carbon dioxide cuts promised by all nations. It provides the absolutely best-case scenario that we can hope for. This estimates a total reduction of 64 Gt carbon dioxide through to 2030. According to the UN’s estimate of 0.8°F [0.44°C] per 1,000 Gt carbon dioxide, this translates to a reduction in temperature by the end of the century of about 0.05°F [0.028°C].” [LOMBORG, p.116] Come again? Yes, you read that right, for over a $US 1 trillion a year, the best available science on climate change would expect it to result in an almost trivial reduction in temperature by the end of the century. You remember the arbitrary deadline a lot of articles are counting towards? What would it take to get us there?
“At the Paris climate summit, politicians also promised to keep global temperature from ever rising beyond 3.6°F (the so-called 2°C limit). Accomplishing this would mean cutting eighty times more carbon emissions than were actually promised (and remember, they are not on track to achieve even that much). To achieve the 3.6°F target, we would literally need new and additional carbon cuts of the same size as those in the Paris Agreement every single year from 2020 to 2100 (and we would need them to be actually delivered, not just promised). The politicians even went so far as to declare in their agreement that they wanted to limit the global temperature increase to below 2.7°F (1.5°C), which would mean cutting one hundred times more than what was promised in Paris. It is therefore accurate to say that the Paris Agreement—even if actually achieved—provides us with only one percent of what politicians are promising.” [LOMBORG,p.120]
This is what all those “the world will end in X years”-headlines are counting towards: Something that is two orders of magnitude harder and probably even more than two order of magnitude more expensive than the already most expensive pact in all of history. So how are we doing on making good on the promises?
“A 2017 landmark article in Nature puts it bluntly: “All major industrialized countries are failing to meet the pledges they made to cut greenhouse-gas emissions.” [LOMBORG, p.118]
Some countries have even gone past the promises of the Paris Climate Agreement and promised even more: they want to go “carbon neutral”, i.e. emit no carbon on net, either by slashing all emissions or by slashing them far enough and removing the same amount carbon from the atmosphere, for example by planting trees.
New Zealand is a great show case for this quest. It promised to be “carbon neutral” by 2050 and had this policy examined by its leading independent think tank. It estimated that this goal translates to 16% of GDP by 2050. That is more than what is spent today on “social security, welfare, health, education, police, courts, defense, environment, and every other part of government combined.” [LOMBORG, p.121]
It accounts to $12.800 per New Zealander per year, if optimal policies where chosen to get to that goal. Experience shows that the optimal route is rarely taken and real implementation costs to be at least roughly double that of the optimal one. But surely this will have a great impact on the climate, right? Well, that depends on your judgement call on the expected 0.004°F [0.002°C] reduction in global average temperatures by the year 2100. Is it worth it? I lack confidence that this commitment will stand the test of time: economic crises have a tendency of shifting priorities to more immediate payoffs.
Nothing in making the spectacularly expensive and ridiculously ineffective policies transparent suggests that we should not act on climate change. It just shows that current approaches or expectations are not well suited for the challenge at hand.
Lomborg spends five chapters on looking into ways to work on climate change.
The first obvious policy is the implementation of a carbon tax. A carbon tax is the most efficient way of reducing carbon emissions. Optimally it would have to be a uniform global tax, which is not likely to happen anytime soon. (I have previously argued for a plan to create a global price on carbon by forming climate clubs).
To get to the right level of taxation, Lomborg walks the reader through the general idea of Nobel prize winner William Nordhaus in assessing the costs and finding an optimal carbon tax, balancing out climate impact costs and climate policy costs.
The “optimal” carbon tax would lead to a 3.5°C temperature increase in 2100, compared to the 4.1°C in the “no policy” scenario. I can’t judge on the veracity of the result itself, but I’d like to challenge anybody to come up with a better method of balancing out the costs and benefits in terms of human life, when deciding on our reaction towards climate change.
Next up is fostering innovation. The main premise is: if combating climate change was profitable today, companies would already be doing it. But it seems like it is not. Right now, fossil fuels are cheap and the only known way to create thriving economies. We have lots of examples of rich countries integrating renewable energies into their already existing and fossil fuel backed electricity grids; we are still waiting to see a developing country to industrialize using renewable energy only. Until we find a clean, reliable energy source that is cheaper than fossil fuels, it will be a really tough sell to make developing countries turn away from the only known way of lifting their people out of poverty. Lomborg’s think tank estimates that each dollar spent on clean energy R&D could avoid $11 of long-term climate change damages. Unfortunately, countries are nowhere close to spending the $100 billion on R&D annually, that where identified as optimal amount, proving that money put into one thing, can’t be simultaneously put into another one: we are spending way more than that on subsidies for the rollout of renewable energies. It seems clear that the old methods of tackling climate change are failing, leaving technological innovation as the only way to make a real impact on the problem. So what are the areas of R&D Lomborg is advocating?
Energy storage, which could turn intermittent renewable energies into a firm energy source, nuclear energy, which proved its ability to deliver carbon-free electricity and promises even cheaper and safer energy in the form of new designs and direct air capture of carbon dioxide to remove CO2 directly from the atmosphere.
Adaptation is the third policy suggestion. Cutting emissions helps everyone in the world a little bit, maybe 50 years later. Adaptation has often immediate and localized benefits. Which makes them more attractive for the affected people. This could mean investing into drought resistant crop varieties, air conditioners, painting buildings and roads in light colors and creating parks to cool the cities during heat waves, early-warning systems, disaster response forces, fire-risk-aware zoning laws or coastline protection. Lomborg shows that the latter can avoid tens of trillions of dollars in flood damages for only tens of billions in investments.
Probably the most controversial suggestion is to increase research efforts on geoengineering. Lomborg is explicitly not advocating for using it right now, but for researching this suit of technologies. Among these technologies are the injection of sulfur particles into the atmosphere or robotic ships that spray salt water into the air to whiten the clouds. Both approaches reduce the amount of sunlight reaching earth’s surface. We have examples of vulcanic eruptions that reduced the amount of sunlight by about 2.5%, thereby reducing the global average temperature by 0.55°C for eighteen months.
These technologies are in their infancy and a lot is unknown about their risks. That’s why Lomborg is advocating for their research. It’s better to know what is possible or what possible threats could originate from a rogue actor, state or private, that uses any of these technologies. Why look at it at all? Because this approach “could dramatically reduce temperature at a very low cost, and in as little as weeks.” [LOMBORG, p.195]
What amount of costs are we talking about?
“Research for Copenhagen Consensus shows that just $9 billion spent building nineteen hundred seawater-spraying boats could prevent all of the temperature increase projected in this century. This is a tantalizing possibility when we consider the $60 trillion in damages in the twenty-first century that would come from unmitigated global warming.” [LOMBORG, p.197]
Geoengineering is an option of last resort for Lomborg, but he considers it to be a good investment to have as a backup plan, if other measures to combat climate change failed.
His last suggestion is probably surprising and goes counter to the dominant narrative:
Making countries richer is actually a great way to lessen the impact of climate change. On human beings, that is.
Richer countries can spend more on adaptation and research and generally have more robust infrastructure to keep people out of harm’s way. Economists generally agree that free-trade is a good way to get people out of poverty. Unfortunately, efforts in that direction have meet increasing resistance in the last years.
Lomborg ends on a cautiously optimistic note:”[I]f we truly want to make the world a better place, we have to be very careful that our preoccupation with climate change doesn’t distract us from other crucial problems. We can improve the human condition far more by opening the world to free trade, ending tuberculosis, and ensuring access to nutrition, contraception, health, education, and technology.” [LOMBORG, pp.221-222] This is very well in line with my thoughts about the best approach to prioritizing society’s goals.
Lomborg’s book reveals a trained economist’s mind looking at a whole range of problems afflicting the world. Applying a rational method to the best available science (IPCC), he gets to an ordered list of priorities for the world to work at. It’s certainly reasonable to argue with certain assumptions or about the validity of individual pieces of evidence. That’s for the scientists to argue about.
But after reading this book, applying any other method than his to the hard questions of our time looks like a child’s approach to an adult’s problem.
Well worth the read!
SOURCES:
[LOMBORG] Lomborg, Bjorn. False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet. Basic Books. Kindle-Version.