Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation ruled that Lomborg had not been
'objectively dishonest', and in March 2004 the DCSD withdrew their allegations.
A great deal was, and remains, at stake. The debate in
Prospect
magazine between
Lomborg and environmentalist Tom Burke, the review in
Nature
by Stuart Pimms
and Jeff Harvey, together with a short series of articles and a lengthy critique in
Scientific American
attacking many of Lomborg's judgements and claims, provide a
clear outline of the issues. As Director of the largely US-funded Copenhagen Consensus
Center, Bjørn Lomborg has turned his attention on climate change, as this issue has
increased in public prominence. He has applied cost-benefit analysis to the effects
of climate change, prompting a withering response from Tom Burke who, writing
in
The Guardian
(Burke, 2004), stated that he was engaging in 'junk economics'
and 'faith-based politics':
Cost-benefit analysis can help you choose different routes to a goal you have
agreed, but it cannot help you choose goals. For that we have politics. People
disagree about priorities and they do so on a huge variety of legitimate grounds.
When they do so, they are not arguing about value for money, but about the
kind of world they want to live in.
It is a vanity of economists to believe that all choices can be boiled down to
calculations of monetary value. In the real world, outcomes are not so easily
managed. A stable climate is something we might now call a system condition
for civilization. That is, it is something without which civilization is impossible
- though it is not, of course, itself a guarantee that there will be civilization.
Not deterred, and using the same approach that characterized
The Sceptical
Environmentalist
's critique of the environmentalist's 'litany' of disasters, Lomborg
published in the
Wall Street Journal
(Lomborg, 2006) his detailed criticism of the
UK Treasury's Stern Review on the economic costs of climate change. Lomborg
questions Stern's calculation that doing nothing about climate change will cost
20 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) while doing something will cost only
1 per cent, suggesting that the true cost of doing something would be nearer 3 per
cent by 2100. He argues that most cost-benefit modelling shows that radical and
early carbon reductions actually cost more than the good they do. What is more, it
is highly unlikely that China and India will participate in any climate mitigation
scheme, not least because, despite China's 2002 pledge to cut sulphur dioxide emissions
by 10 per cent, they are presently 27 per cent higher and are a far more serious
threat to human health and the environment than climate change. In
Cool It
, Lomborg
(2007) pursues his argument that we need to find more intelligent ways of spending
these billions of dollars that will genuinely enable humanity to adapt as well as
mitigate the effects of climate change. Practical and pragmatic solutions are required,
rather than feel-good policy statements that lead to very little.
Sustainable development is politically, economically, ethically, ideologically and
scientifically charged. It will not be easy and the dialogue continues.
Science, politics and climate change
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) defines
climate change, in Article 1, as 'a change of climate which is attributed directly or
indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere
