Bjorn Lomborg has seen the future of climate policy, and it doesn’t work. In his opinion, featured Friday in the Washington Post, a binding treaty to reduce carbon emissions – the goal that was pursued unsuccessfully at the Copenhagen conference in December – would have done more harm than good. Reducing emissions enough to stabilize the temperature would have astronomical costs, according to Lomborg, while the benefits would be small.
This is par for the course for Lomborg, a Danish political scientist who has gained international notoriety for his repeated attacks on environmental protection. His source for his climate policy skepticism is a very selective reading of economics, described grandly and inaccurately as what all economists think. For instance, do “all the major climate economic models” agree on a specific, extreme forecast of carbon taxes, as asserted by Lomborg? Not a chance; major models tend to disagree somewhat about such forecasts, and there is no consensus around anything like Lomborg’s claim. Do “most mainstream calculations” agree that global climate damages will be less than $1 trillion per year (a fraction of one percent of global output) by the end of the century, as he also alleges? Again, not even close.
The most widely discussed recent economic analysis of climate change, the Stern Review, reached conclusions opposite to Lomborg’s. Modest expenditures on emission reductions, according to Nicholas Stern, would prevent enormous climate damages. It is difficult to describe Stern, formerly the chief economist at the World Bank and a top official in the British Treasury Department, as outside the mainstream. For a list of dozens of peer-reviewed journal articles by American and European economists, supporting active climate policy measures, interested readers can consult RealClimateEconomics.org.
I wouldn’t presume to summarize the state of Danish political science without doing quite a bit of background reading. Perhaps Lomborg could show the same humility about climate economics, at least until he’s had time for more careful reading in the field.
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Frank Ackerman | January 19, 2010
Bjorn Lomborg has seen the future of climate policy, and it doesn’t work. In his opinion, featured Friday in the Washington Post, a binding treaty to reduce carbon emissions – the goal that was pursued unsuccessfully at the Copenhagen conference in December – would have done more harm than good. Reducing emissions enough to stabilize […]
Ben Somberg | January 19, 2010
Two developments to note on coal ash from recent days: OIRA extended its review of EPA’s not-yet-publicly-proposed regulation on coal ash. That gives it an additional 30-days from the previous Jan 14 deadline. Matthew Madia explains at The Fine Print. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson mentioned coal ash in an appearance Thursday, saying, “There has been […]
James Goodwin | January 15, 2010
This post is second in a series on the new CPR report Obama’s Regulators: A First-Year Report Card. It’s only fair to note that when President Obama assumed office in January of 2009, he inherited a slate of dysfunctional protector agencies. Perhaps none were more dysfunctional than the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC)—the tiny agency […]
Rena Steinzor | January 14, 2010
Over the weekend, the Associated Press ran a story on the results of its enterprising investigation into the toxic content of children’s jewelry imported from China. Pressed to abandon the use of toxic lead in toys and jewelry, manufacturers have apparently begun using an even more dangerous metal, cadmium, which can cause neurological damage – […]
Rena Steinzor | January 13, 2010
EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson announced Monday that the agency will propose new rules to reduce pollution from runoff from urban and suburban areas and from concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). This announcement goes far in demonstrating that the EPA under President Obama is serious about its commitments to improve the quality of the nation’s waters, […]
Sandra Zellmer | January 13, 2010
My family has gotten a lot smaller lately. My mother died in 2004, my father in 2007, and my uncle in 2008. I’ve done the five stages of grief, as introduced by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in 1969, but not exactly as she described. It’s true that I initially felt denial: “I’m a lucky person; this can’t […]
Holly Doremus | January 12, 2010
Cross-posted from Legal Planet. Last Monday, EPA signed off on the Corps of Engineers’ issuance of a Clean Water Act § 404 permit to Hobet Mining for a mountaintop removal coal mining project in West Virginia. The decision is important because it’s the first product of the process announced last fall for joint EPA / […]
Sidney A. Shapiro | January 11, 2010
As reported in a post Saturday, OMB has become the epicenter for industry efforts to head off an EPA regulation concerning coal ash. There have been 17 meetings between industry interests and OMB officials. When questioned about the large number of meetings, an OMB spokesman said, “This has been a very regular, very normal deliberative […]
James Goodwin | January 9, 2010
“White House, EPA at Odds Over Coal-Waste Rules” reads a headline in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal. It’s worth a look. The White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) has in fact continued to host meetings with outside groups regarding EPA’s work on a rule for controlling the disposal of hazardous coal ash waste. […]