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Lomborg on Climate R&D
Björn Lomborg, famous author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, has converted to a recognition that climate change is a major problem. In the April 7 issue of The New York Review of Books, Bill McKibben analyses Lomborg's work. McKibben comments on the relative priority of action to reduce emissions, research and development to make low carbon energy technology economically competitive, and political action on climate change.
We are at a dramatic moment in the story of global warming. We’ve known, as a society, about the climate change crisis for just over twenty years, from the day in June 1988 when the NASA scientist James Hansen testified before Congress that the planet was heating up because we were burning so much fossil fuel and hence emitting so much carbon dioxide. By 2010—the warmest year on record, according to most of the planet’s record-keepers—the earth was getting a taste of what global warming feels like in its early stages. Nineteen nations set new all-time temperature records, itself a record; in early summer Pakistan set the new all-time high for Asia at 128 degrees. That warmth accelerated the already rapid melt of the Greenland ice sheet; in some areas the melt season lasted fifty days longer than average. Meanwhile, record heat in central Russia triggered wildfires and drought, spooking the Kremlin enough that it suspended all grain exports to the rest of the world, which helped push the price of wheat sharply higher.
As I have commented here before, I support Lomborg's view that carbon tax is a largely useless distraction from direct investment in low carbon energy technology research and development.
Here are some of Lomborg's comments in support of this argument from a recent interview on the role of innovation in solving warming:
Quote:
"global warming is man-made, it is something we need to fix, but let's be quite frank: we're just not doing it and we haven't been doing it for the last 20 years because we're essentially barking up the wrong tree. So it's much more a question of being sceptical of the political means that we try to use to tackle this problem....if we want to tackle climate change we got to realise any realistic carbon tax is just not going to do it. First of all, even if we have a substantial carbon tax, it's only going to reduce emissions a little, and of course we're not going to get it in China and India and the US. Now, this doesn't mean that there's not a good academic argument to say, "Let's have a small carbon tax," but it is to recognise this is simply the sideshow. If we want to do something about global warming, it's not about trying to make fossil fuel so expensive nobody wants it - because that's never going to happen. It's about making green energy so cheap everyone wants it. And so it's really about innovation into green energy technology, and that we are very poor at and we don't talk very much about.... if you spend the money on research and development, that's the part that will really make the impact. It's not about the carbon tax, it's about the investment in research and development into green energy technology development. ... if we could innovate the price down of solar panels over the next two to four decades to be cheaper than fossil fuels, we would have solved global warming. Everyone, including the Chinese and the Indians, would switch. ... focus on making those next generations rather than spending lots and lots of money on inefficient technology.... This is not about us feeling good, this is about making sure that we do good in the long run.... the German example, they've spent $75 billion on subsidising solar panels, the net effect which will be to postpone global warming by the end of the century by seven hours. That's not spending money smartly. That's simply throwing away money to feel good. ... the European Union. They're planning to cut their emissions 20 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020. The macroeconomic models indicate that the cost of that, the average of all these macroeconomic models indicate the cost will be about $250 billion a year. And the net effect, after having done that for 80 years, till 2100, will be a reduction in temperature by one 20th of one degree centigrade. ... we didn't have to spend $250 billion to get there; we had to spend the money on the research and development, not on buying all the inefficient technology. ... I helped organise something called the "Copenhagen consensus for climate" where we asked 28 of the world's top climate economists, three Nobel laureates, what are the smartest solutions to climate change and they actually said spend money on research and development, but spend it across the whole area. Spend it on all the different technologies. We shouldn't be picking winners, but the point is because researchers are incredibly cheap, you can afford all of this at a cost of 0.2 per cent of GDP.... we do the exact same thing for medical science. We don't expect pharmaceuticals to make blue sky researcher, create Nobel laureates. We do this because there's a great public benefit ...governments ... should invest smartly and fundamentally we should make sure we spend it where we'll actually solve global warming and solve the problem of acidification and many other things ... rather than having this conversation for another 10 years that's going to lead nowhere."
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Re: Lomborg on Climate R&D
It's an interesting position, but of course any technology develops in generations, and Lomborg makes it sound as if we should wait until we've innovated and then deploy. We can't do that, can we? We'll need to use the technology we now have while better technology might be developed. The money we have will need to stretch to cover both needs.
Jared Diamond warns against our persistent faith article that technology will save us. That could be fatal. It seems abundantly clear that no new technology will deliver the energy value that the miracle fuel, oil, has provided for the past century. We need to adjust downward the per capita consumption in the developed countries in order to make room for a decent level in the developing countries. There isn't enough energy to go around for every one of us to live like North Americans. Even if there was, the environmental price from even so-called benign sources would be too high. We're going to need to do something unprecedented, transform our lifestyles to be less energy intensive. Our standard of living now depends on having ever-more energy to use. Improving efficiency won't even enable us to stay where we are. We might as well embrace a new way rather than face the worse consequences of being unprepared for energy scarcity.
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Re: Lomborg on Climate R&D
DWill, it is not true that there is not enough energy. The sun pumps out about ten billion times as much energy as hits the earth. If we concentrate on research and development to tap the energy of the universe, we can all live better than kings of old, and the world population can increase to twenty billion humans in harmony with the environment. Lomborg's point is that subsidising current renewable technology that is more expensive than fossil fuels is both a waste of money and a distraction from the challenge of solving global warming. If we deploy resources on Manhattan Project or Apollo Project scale to make new energy technology commercially competitive, we can have a sustainable global economy with all the energy we want. Frugality is a false economy, giving a false perception of contributing to solving the problem. The only thing that helps is deployment of resources at global scale for research and development of new technology. Carbon pricing is similarly a distraction from the R&D agenda, the tail wagging the dog. Economic incentives to develop technology are much less efficient than resources to develop technology. As I have argued before, covering 0.1% of the world ocean with highly productive algae biofuel farms can solve the world's problems of fuel and food and climate.
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Re: Lomborg on Climate R&D
With respect, Robert, but this is in the technological panacea vein and should immediately be suspect. Even if your idea were to work as envisioned, there are huge problems in everyone getting access to such energy.
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Re: Lomborg on Climate R&D
Yes, all true. But the point is that to stabilise global climate, "emission reduction" is necessary but not sufficient. In fact, emission rates are accelerating, and expected to continue to do so despite all the hand wringing. Commercial methods are needed to physically extract CO2 from the air in order to return to what scientists see as the stable optimum of 350 parts per million. New technologies are needed to stabilise the climate, such as algae biofuel that can actually suck more carbon from the air than it returns by sequestering carbon as algae in the ocean.
The real point Lomborg makes is that governments are committing billions of dollars to subsidising current renewable technologies that will not actually slow global warming, while doing very little to support innovative research and development. The priorities are skewed, and are failing to address the real climate and energy security problems. As Lomborg says in the interview I quote above, carbon tax is just a sideshow.
The following user would like to thank Robert Tulip for this post: DWill
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