Crazy Danish Person
‘Our uphill task is to try to show that problems involving the greatest pictures and the cutest animals are not necessarily the most pressing issues.’This is the sort of dull pragmatism that so often gets Lomborg into trouble. People will read him saying that the threat to polar bears has been somewhat exaggerated, given that their global population has increased fivefold since the 1960s, and they’ll think: ‘Heartless, evil Bush shill, probably in the pay of Big Oil.’ Whereas all Lomborg is actually saying in his remorselessly logical, Danish statistics professor’s way, is: ‘Let’s take emotion and hysteria and fluffy white fur out of the argument and try to seek the objective truth.’ james delingpole the spectator
So here is the deal: we can spend $1.00 today and save one kid in a Third World country from dying of an easily preventable condition – or we can spend that dollar on the speculation that, for example, sequestering CO2 will, in fifty years save one, as yet unborn kid in a Third World country if the models are right and if the science they are based on is right and if we are not arriving at a solar minima.
This is not a hard question.
But here’s a hint:
What non-economists tend to have difficulty understanding, says Lomborg, is the concept of marginal benefit. ‘We tend to think in terms of absolute magnitude, so people will say, “Global warming is overall a bigger problem than micronutrition so we should deal with that first.” But what economists say is, “No. If you can spend a billion dollars and save 600,000 kids from dying and save about two billion people from being malnourished, that’s a lot better than spending the same amount to postpone global warming by about two minutes at the end of the century.”
June 18th, 2008 at 4:25 am
Of course, that’s not what Lomborg is saying.
Lomborg’s statement about postponing climate change by two minutes sets up a straw man; that’s not what a billion dollars will do. And, we’re not talking about a billion dollars on climate change OR saving starving kids. We should be doing both – and spending two billion instead of one. This post discusses the issue well (and really good comments).
And things are more complex than simply hurling cash anyway; Lomborg misrepresents the arguments about marginal cost, because he doesn’t include a lot of pertinent data – he was wrong about the polar bears, remember? And, adaptation to climate change, particularly in third world countries who are being hit the hardest by lowering water tables, desertification, drought, flood, etc – will cost us twice as much as any preventative amelioration, and will also be necessary as climate change gets worse and worse (where are the marginal calculations of those costs?). The sad part is that Lomborg is partly right, but for the wrong reasons.
Here’s a great link with links to all the various debunkings of Lomborg. It’s been around for awhile, and yet people still read the guy. Weird.
June 19th, 2008 at 2:57 pm
The thing is, while Lomborg would apparently want to reveal “global warmism” as a costly religion, and that I think it is, he surely doesn’t have any way of measuring the value of the religion as religion. I mean, whatever bad policy the religion may encourage, it is still doing what all religions do, which is somehow valuable (relative to other possible religions): binding people together and giving a purpose and direction to life.
This can all be summed up in terms of the basic job of all religion: stopping, to a degree, people from fighting and killing each other.
I don’t think the value of the first truly global religion can be summed up in dollar terms, whether or not there really is global warming. For all we know now, “global warmism” may one day give us the key to, say, getting out from under oil-financed terrorism. We need some kind of religion to achieve such things because possible solutions to such problems cannot be reduced to rational calculations about future outcomes; if we took a strictly rational, cost/benefit analysis of life, we’d never have the shared faith necessary to get people interested in discovering out of the box solutions that only later, after they have been developed, can enter into rational cost/benefit analysis…
new technologies often drive their innovators/financiers bankrupt, but people develop them anyway because they’ve got the bug; and then later, someone finds a way to redeem that initial loss…
Perhaps we need to acknowledge the need, in this day and age, for some new kind of global religion and work to make it more intelligent than it is at present.
June 19th, 2008 at 7:03 pm
And, we’re not talking about a billion dollars on climate change OR saving starving kids.
At the margin, we are talking about exactly that, Renee.
We should be doing both – and spending two billion instead of one.
But we’re not, are we? And if we were, we are still faced with the question of whether the last dollar (or hundred million dollars) has been spent where we get the most benefit. On that basis, global warming / climate change doesn’t make the cut.
June 20th, 2008 at 4:41 am
Ah, but that’s because markets underprice both natural commodities and negative externalities.
When you honestly consider environmental degradation as part of the problem of poverty in developing countries (and I mean even little things like the drawing-down of aquifers during drought or, er, drought, things which affect developing countries disproportionately due to their heavy reliance on agriculture), then the scale begins to tip, particularly when you start to consider the climate changes that will accelerate as standard of living (and hence environmental degradation) increases, and the infrastructure changes that will need to be made to withstand higher climate-related risks in the future – we can devote money to famine now or prevent famine in the future, but what’s the lost opportunity cost of having to rebuild existing infrastructure and public policy, or adapting sooner and building it right?
And then there’s the fact that we’re beginning to run up against hard production limits that will increase the costs of adaptation or mitigation; the longer we delay, the higher these costs go. The models show that no financial transfers are needed now only if you don’t consider resource shortages or other unfeasibilities of increasing proactive adaptation/mitigation aid in the future.
I’ll say it again: this is not an either/or calculation, and true unbelievers like Lomborg fail to honestly consider the complex impacts and interrelations that they teach in any second-year economics course.
June 20th, 2008 at 5:47 pm
Ah, but that’s because markets underprice both natural commodities and negative externalities.
Blah blah blah…
Completely irrelevent, as was most of what followed. Whether the market underprices or overprices
saythe health of a Bangladeshi or the value of copper doesn’t matter – becasue we are not talking about a market-driven transaction here: we are talking about government-led action to reduce human suffering (or improve total human welfare; are yoiu a pessimist or an optimist?). There is a limit to what we can spend on that project; in fact, there are two limits, a hard limit and a soft. The hard limit is the total accumulated wealth in the world, the soft limit is the willingness of (western) consumers and taxpayers to finance the venture. Whether that limit is one Billion or twenty, we still have to ensure that every dollar is allocated where it does the most good – and global warming doesn’t make the cut.June 29th, 2008 at 7:48 am
Clearly you aren’t even a second-year economics student, since you didn’t actually understand what I wrote and failed to say anything that undermined it. The argument was whether or not global warming made the cut for expenditures of limited resources: you simply stated that it doesn’t. Which is not an argument at all.