Lomborg, Ridley and Power to the People
The Lukewarmer’s Way | April 28, 2015
Bjorn Lomborg has been invited by the Australian government via the University of Western Australia to relocate the Copenhagen Consensus Center to the lucky country. I wish him well in his new surroundings.
News of this has revived the muttering and outright ranting about how Evil!!! Lomborg is. This is because the policy conclusions of the Consensus Centre (and Lomborg in his writings prior to the CC being established) shows that investing in renewable energy and other mitigation and adaptation measures regarding climate change is less effective at improving health and raising living standards in the developing world than other measures, such as insuring access to micro nutrients, suppressing and treating malaria, etc.
Obviously, Lomborg and the CC are right. Nicholas Stern estimates the cost of dealing with climate change at between 1% and 5% of global GDP. Providing micro nutrients for the poor costs pennies per person. The only real question is are healthy poor people more important than reducing CO2 emissions?
Although Stern and a few other economists argue that eliminating or reducing the threat of climate change for people in 2100 is more important than providing sustenance to today’s poor, not many agree, which is why the argument is rarely put in such stark terms.
However, the argument is clearest in discussions about provision of power to the poor. Those most alarmed about climate change wish to push the developing world into using renewable energy sources instead of the much cheaper and more available fossil fuels, especially coal. As Matt Ridley notes over at his blog, “In 2013 Ed Davey, the energy secretary, announced that British taxpayers will no longer fund coal-fired power stations in developing countries, and that he would put pressure on development banks to ensure that their funding policies rule out coal. (I declare a commercial interest in coal in Northumberland.)
In the same year the US passed a bill prohibiting the Overseas Private Investment Corporation — a federal agency responsible for underwriting American companies that invest in developing countries — from investing in energy projects that involve fossil fuels.”
This argument is not actually new–those of us who remember the Greenpeace thug who threatened skeptics saying “We know where you live and we be many while you be few” know that the subject under discussion was Greenpeace and the WWF’s efforts to stop World Bank funding for a coal plant in South Africa.
The average household income for someone with solar panels on their roof in the USA is $150,000. The capital costs of renewable energy make it unaffordable for Africa and India in most cases.
There are numerous exceptions, of course. In areas where it is expensive to extend the transmission grid to villages, Rural Electrification Programs using solar power have been used effectively since the 1980s. However, these don’t provide enough power to truly power a village–at most they provide radio and some lighting. These are hugely valuable and I support the expansion of such programs.
But they are insufficient for powering the light industry the region needs to truly improve their lot and they cannot power the refrigeration needed for improved health outcomes.
Lomborg is right that the poor of today need more concrete aid than they do emission reductions. Ridley is right to point out that coal fired power plants are what they are crying out for and would make possible the concrete aid that we all know they need.
And the manic Alarmists have forgotten that coal, bad as it is (I am no friend of coal), is a denser fuel than dung and firewood, emitting less than what it will replace. Obviously, because of the potential to provide more power to more people, emissions will rise as it saves lives, but dung burnt indoors kills millions and the relentless search for firewood denudes forests and exposes the women who undertake the daily search to threats of attack from animals and unscrupulous men.
The developing world has found an unlikely savior in China, who are well-pleased to help them build the infrastructure that Africa and Southern Asia need, want and are crying out for.
Because the argument is truly clear, alarmists are reduced to insinuations about Lomborg’s motives (does he really want to help the poor?) and the horror of his being offered a post in Australia, while Ridley is attacked because he used to serve on the board of a bank that went broke some years ago. Phoney arguments such as these keep the alarmists occupied, the water muddied and the Greens still dictating policy to western governments. Alarmists agonize over whether or not climate scientists should fly (coming to the conclusion that they should), but after sober reflection they call helping Africa a ‘serious and complex issue’.
Perhaps the clearest example of their hypocrisy is their accusation that people like “Lomborg and Ridley, if they were serious, would be encouraging dialogue, not trying to demonize” their opponents.
After ten years of a concerted effort by Greens to demonize Lomborg and Ridley, the very people who have demonized Lomborg and Ridley say they shouldn’t demonize their opponents. But Lomborg and Ridley do not. They don’t make attacks on people or even organizations. They just show quite clearly that stringent caps on emissions that are enforced first on the poor and loosely or not at all on the rich kill, sicken and immiserate the poor. It is the Greens that have vigorously pursued a policy of vicious and calculated demonization of those like Lomborg and Ridley.
At some point, future generations will have a different color code–and they will say that Greens have no right to advocate policies that trap Black and Brown people in poverty. They may use a different ‘G’ word to describe the net effects of what Greens are doing today.
There is a case to be made for saying the aggregate effect of Green policy in the developing world is perilously close to being complicit in genocide. At the very least they are showing an appalling indifference to the plight of people in the developing world. I wonder if the skeptics will mention that while they’re touring the Vatican?
China is doing more for the world’s poor than Greenpeace. Go figure.
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Hasn’t Lomborg said that there’s no harm in depleting the world’s fish stocks, because we have fish farming? I think I’ve read that in one of his books. If so, that’s enough in itself to show that he’s either dishonest or a nut case.
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Maybe you should confirm your smear rather than just post a baseless ad hominem. Perhaps you were the victim of your own credulousness in the face of the “ten years of a concerted effort by Greens to demonize Lomborg” mentioned in the article.
If you can’t counter his argument you have no legitimate comment to offer. You are, in fact, acceding to his position as being unassailable.
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Hi, Aletho. See The Skeptical Environmentalist (Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 108. Cheers.
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Well, Amazon won’t show that page without payment and an internet search only results in a detractor making the same, likely misconstrued, claim you are perhaps repeating. We will have to assume it is baseless until shown otherwise.
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He thinks the catastrophic “Green Revolution” was a terrific advance too (ibid, p. 63). No need to demonize him, he demonizes himself.
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I’m sure that you read plenty of authors that are not skeptical abut the green revolution. Among scientists that position is almost ubiquitous. If you choose to ignore all scientists you are left with very limited perspectives.
Look, I have the same problem, I have very little respect for people who fail to understand that nuclear energy is not only immoral but simply uneconomic.
Scientists on both sides of the AGW issue, practically without exception, support nuclear power. I could choose to remain totally ignorant about AGW and base my opinion on total gobbledygook feelings, or I could accept that climate scientists are neither economists nor philosophers and that scientists and engineers are inherently weak minded since they generally have a very narrow focus. We all have strengths and weaknesses.
Instead of writing scientists off altogether, I choose to value their input within their particular area of expertise. Lomborg is a climate scientist, this is his area of interest.
I still think that you have been taken in by someone’s misrepresentation of Lomborg’s position on fish populations. You ought to get the book at the library and find out.
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Come now, would I be referring you to passages from it if I hadn’t read it? I read it years ago, and it left me with with the utmost loathing for Lomborg and everything he stands for. He advocates hi-tech, chemical-dependent, GR agriculture (he thinks it’s “more productive”), and shows no concern for, or even awareness of, such adverse impacts as poisoned air, water, land, crops and people, permanently degraded soil, malnutrition, or the social catastrophe of millions of peasants being dispossessed, forced off their farms and transformed into an impoverished urban proletariat, while the land that formerly sustained them and their families is cultivated by giant agribusiness corporations growing cash crops for export. As noted, he’s also a great fan of fish farming, and again shows no interest in or awareness of the severe damage that it inflicts on the marine environment. All his thinking is misguided and very harmful. If he says coal is a good thing, we may be quite sure it’s a bad thing. In any case, the future of energy is solar panels, as we all know.
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With solar panels you pay the corporate masters upfront, you pay more, and you assume all the risk that their promised service life will be achieved.
After decades of promises to become economic, if only brought to scale with subsidies, the technology is still hopelessly costly.
The environmental footprint of solar farms is orders of magnitude worse than power plants. Where is the awareness and concern about ecology on the part of the alternative energy sector? Missing altogether. They simply fraudulently claim that co2 is a pollutant and ignore all other environmental impacts.
Solar power is going nowhere if for no other reason than if it ever were to approach competitive pricing, carbon fuel producers would simply lower their prices.
The impression you claim to have of Lomborg’s book is contrary to what he writes in the article above. Perhaps you should read the article and then re-read the book.
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Just pulling your leg about the solar panels, Aletho, I know you don’t share my views in the matter. Western Australia would be a good place to install them, come to think of it. Maybe Lomborg, in his new position, will become a convert to solar.
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One thing that I will agree with 100% on is that both alarrmists and deniers are pushing nuclear and fracked gas as a solution ‘ Neither one solves anything.
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This is an interesting initiative:
http://www.lfpress.com/2015/05/27/london-solar-panel-project-expected-to-save-lives-in-gaza-strip
The Zionists will bomb the panels, of course. Solar panels are in widespread use in the West Bank, and Jewish soldiers and settlers routinely riddle them with machine-gun fire, partly for fun and to make the people’s lives more difficult (they do the same with water tanks, for the same reasons). All the same, it’s very promising, and gives you a glimpse of the fantastic potential of solar power. No grid necessary!
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If one is so unfortunate or deprived as to have no access to grid power one must use exorbitantly expensive alternatives or go without altogether.
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The future arrives with giant steps:
http://business.financialpost.com/news/transportation/fossil-fuel-vehicles-will-vanish-in-8-years-in-twin-death-spiral-for-big-oil-and-big-autos-says-study-that-shocking-the-industry
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Complete non-starter.
Electric cars would require more Nuke Plants than could be supplied with uranium. Transmission lines would be omnipresent. Copper would become critically costly. Pollution from the battery industry would engulf the world.
LNG will displace diesel then gasoline, this is now beginning to unfold. It will be both cheaper and cleaner.
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