Setting priorities


Environmentalism takes a lower priority
This is an older one, but it got put on the bottom of my pile.

It's important though, even if it isn't the first time Bjorn Lomborg has encouraged this kind of thinking.

The report that received the headlines was Monday's 700-page jeremiad out of London on fighting climate change. Commissioned by the British government and overseen by former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern, the report made the intentionally shocking prediction that global warming could eliminate from 5% to 20% of world economic output "forever." Meanwhile, doing the supposedly virtuous thing and trying to forestall this catastrophe would cost merely an estimated 1% of world GDP. Thus we must act urgently and with new taxes and policies that go well beyond anything in the failed Kyoto Protocol.

The other event was a meeting at the United Nations organized by economist Bjørn Lomborg's Copenhagen Consensus Center. Ambassadors from 24 countries--including Australia, China, India and the U.S.--mulled which problems to address if the world suddenly found an extra $50 billion lying around. Mr. Lomborg's point is that, in a world with scarce resources, you need priorities. The consensus was that communicable diseases, sanitation and water, malnutrition and hunger, and education were all higher priorities than climate change.

We invited Mr. Lomborg to address the Stern report, and he takes apart its analysis brick-by-brick here. To our reading, there isn't much left of this politicized edifice. But we'd stress a couple of points ourselves.

The first is that the Stern review almost surely understates the real costs of combating climate change. The International Energy Agency has estimated that the world must spend $16 trillion on infrastructure from 2001 to 2030 just to meet growing energy demand. That by itself would be 1% of GDP over that period. And that doesn't include the cost of moving to carbon-free power from fossil fuels, or the financial "incentives"--i.e., global subsidies from Western taxpayers--that China and India would need if the Stern report's policies were to have any chance of being implemented. The Stern review also calls for substantially increasing taxes, which we know from experience would also reduce global GDP and thus leave fewer resources to fight the consequences of any warming.

The article is talking about tradeoffs. Engineers and scientists do tradeoffs all the time. We could build a car that is incredibly safe, gas efficient, and with almost no environmental impact.

But who would want a car in the $100,000 range that you could only drive a few days a year?

As California learned, regulating the price of electricity increases the chances of "rolling blackouts." It's not that the energy isn't available, it's just that it's undeliverable without profit.

Even assuming for a moment that global warming is human caused catastrophe that must be avoided (an assumption I DO NOT SHARE), what has government done to show that they can be trusted with economic power on this scale?

At least in the United States, some of the officials are accountable. That isn't so in the United Nations, and certainly isn't so in most of the member states. And that is before the social tweaks get put into place.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Tue - November 21, 2006 at 01:00 PM  Tag


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