This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.
Paul Comrie-Thomson: the climate debate in this country seems stuck at the Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire level. can't we do better than this? well consider the following: In the March 2011 edition of Quadrant magazine, we read this:
Paul Comrie-Thomson: Bjorn Lomborg, adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School, and director of the Copenhagen Business Centre. His new documentary is called Cool It, and Michael, it's out in about three weeks. I cannot wait. Bjorn was speaking in Melbourne last Monday at an event presented by the Australian Institute for International Affairs.
Man-made emissions are likely to cause a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide during this century and this increase will continue to have a warming effect on global temperatures. But one of the disappointing distortions of the climate science debate is the claim that sceptics deny this relationship. What sceptics are sceptical about is the strength of these anthropogenic global warming effects.That's from the Quadrant article 'The Intelligent Voter's guide to Global Warming' written by Geoffrey Lehmann, Peter Farrell and Dick Warburton.
But ten years earlier, in The Sceptical Environmentalist, Bjorn Lomborg stated this:
My book accepts the reality of manmade global warming but questions the way in which future scenarios have been arrived at and finds that forecasts of climate change of six degrees by the end of the century are not plausible. I shall argue that the limitations of computer modelling, the unrealist nature of the basic assumptions made about future technological change and political value-judgments have distorted the scenarios being presented to the public.The initial response to Lomborg's dispassionate analysis was ugly. He was trashed by the environmentalist establishment. And over the next ten years it appeared he was labouring in the wilderness. Then, post-Copenhagen Lomborg was finally recognised by many as being the environmentalist that made the most sense.
In a recent address in Melbourne presented by the Australian Institute of International Affairs, Bjorn Lomborg recommended we bring the whole climate debate back to basic principles. Here now are edited highlights of his address.
Bjorn Lomborg: What is it we're actually trying to achieve, because we have a tendency in this climate debate to just jump right ahead and say that it's all about cutting carbon emissions. But let's just remember -- presumably this is about making a better world. And we've got to ask ourselves how do we do that. And I think a large part of what we do in the climate debate is mostly about feeling good rather than actually doing good. It's about something that's fashionable rather than something that actually does good, something that's rational. So I'd like to pause and say, 'What can actually work?'
At the same time I think we would be well served by getting rid of some of the emotionalism, get a sense of what is actually the up and down of this climate debate. We need to remove our myths, simply because being panicked is not likely to be a good state to be in to make important decisions. And then of course the last part of my point is simply going to be to say we've only got a limited amount of money. If we overspend on some things it means we end up underspending on other issues. So let's make sure we find the smartest and most effective strategies to fix climate change -- and all the other issues in the world.
So I really just like to make four simple points here tonight. I put up a picture here about [unclear] we gave a presentation to Congress a couple of years ago to say there's many different views, but I really think we need to reel back and realise: all of us want to fix climate change. All of us want to do good. We have different opinions about what's going to get us there, but I think we need to stop calling each other names and start thinking about are there smart, middle-of-the-road arguments to be achieved. As you've pointed out, yes we have deniers, yes we have alarmists. And I would like to present to you what I think is a smart, middle-of-the-road argument, and in some senses a solutionist argument. Instead of just screaming about the problem, let's start talking about what actually works.
So, the four points. The first one is global warming's real, it's man-made, it is an important problem, it is something we need to fix. So let's get the whole denialist argument to rest. I think there's very little argument leftover to say that nothing's happening and people have no responsibility. I would actually argue that this is on the agenda, thanks to Al gore and many others, having put it into the American mind and certainly around the world that this is a problem that we need to fix.
I would argue again that the best information we have comes from the UN Climate Panel, the so-called IPCC. This certainly doesn't mean it's perfect, as we've also seen a year, year-and-a-half ago. There's definitely problems. But it's the best that we have, and I think we need to revert to saying if we're going to make good judgment we need to ask, essentially, what's the best information we have? That comes from the UN Climate Panel.
Let me just give you a sense of what they're saying. Again, lots and lots of information out there, but just get a sense of what are they expecting -- well if you look at the likely temperature rise over this century, they're saying it's going to be around 2.6 degrees centigrade rise by the end of the century compared to today.
Their scenarios show somewhere between one point six and three point eight degrees centigrade. That doesn't sound like very much, but because it's an average it's actually a significant change for the world. The economic models, and that's part of what I'm going to be talking a lot about, indicates if you try to add up all the benefits and disbenefits of global worming -- remember global warming is not just going to be bad but it's going to be predominantly bad, so if you add up all the impacts of global warming into the indefinite future and discount it back to today...essentially say how much money would you have to pony up today to cover all the damages into the extended future for global warming -- the answer is the cost is about 15 trillion dollars.
That used to be a very big number before the financial crisis, and in some ways it still is. It certainly is a number that's big enough that it ought to make us sit up straight in our chairs and start thinking about how do we deal with this in the best possible way. On the other hand, and that's important to recognise, and the net worth -- and this is again all the estimates from the UN Climate Panel -- the net worth of the 21st century is about 3,000 trillion dollars.
So we're talking about half a percentage point of the 21st century. That's the amount, approximately, that global warming is going to do damage. And it's important because it indicates very clearly it's not zero, as many denialists would say, but it's not 100% or something like that as we often seem to hear from the media. It's half a percentage point. And that indicates that we need to fix global warming. It is a problem. We need to find a smart solution. But first of all of course we need to find a solution that doesn't actually cost more than the original ailment and we also need to implement it smartly.
So what should we do? Well before I get there, I'd like to just talk to you a little bit about the problems that we very often have in this conversation, as I've mentioned earlier, it's a very emotional issue. And I would argue to a very large extent it's because what we hear about global warming is often very exaggerated and/or one-sidedly presented. And that leads to bad judgement. If you have a gun to your head you're unlikely to make overall smart and cool assessments. So we need to take away the hysteria and start talking about how should we tackle global warming.
I'm going to have a look at the standard story, I think no-one has told it better than Al Gore. Al Gore said -- but of course many, many others are saying this up to this day. Al Gore called global warming a planetary emergency and told us we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet into a tailspin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and heatwaves beyond anything we've ever experienced. That certainly sounds like something you want to avoid.
Let's have a look at some of those statements, because those are the kinds of statements that we hear all the time, and of course especially here in Australia, where we're being told that many of these things are going to devastate our future. Extreme weather: if we look at hurricanes, some of the best studied hurricanes, we have pretty much the same numbers for Australia but I'm going to show you the ones for the US because they go much further back. This is from 1900 until 2009, so the last 109 years' damage impact in the US from hurricanes, inflation-adjusted so you can actually compare the numbers, which are essentially, seeing as there is no impact in the early part of the last century, very little impact in the middle of last century and only towards the end of last century and the beginning of this century they dramatically increase.
This seems to indicate that Al Gore and his ilk are very correct. Global warming is going to make the damage costs in the US go up and up and it's just going to get worse and worse. It is very true that costs are going to get worse and worse. It has very little to do with global warming. It has everything to do with the fact that many more people live with much more stuff closer to where hurricanes hit.
Let me show you one. This is Miami Beach in 1921. It's clear that if a hurricane hits here, yes you're probably going to move some deckchairs, but it's probably not going to cause that much damage. Whereas of course if a hurricane hit the same place in 2006 there would be a lot more damage. So the researchers that looked at the first graph I just showed you said what would have happened if all US hurricanes that hit the US over the last 109 years had hit the US in those years but as if the US was as it is today. That's essentially adjusting for the change in wealth and population. And what it shows us is this very, very dramatically different picture. You see much, much more damage in the first part of last century. Actually the most damaging hurricane was in 1926, the great American Miami hurricane that tore right through downtown Miami. But as you just saw, not much there to damage. Although had it hit today, it would have been the costliest damage in US history. It was also one of the deadliest, that killed about twice as many as died in Hurricane Katrina.
The second largest was Galveston hurricane in 1900. The biggest killer in the US, about five times as many as Hurricane Katrina, and Hurricane Katrina was only a third larger. There was 80 billion of the 150 that we saw in 2005. We see a very, very different picture. And that's important, because what really matters is, again, how we leave the world for our descendants. Do we want to leave a world where we feel better about ourselves or one where we've actually made a difference? And again that's incredibly important to ask ourselves. What can we actually do?
Well when we look at reasonable worst-case scenarios, we're actually expecting with global warming that hurricanes will get a little worse. But they'll probably get a little fewer. So, if we take a look at the reasonable worst-case scenarios, we'll probably see by mid-century about a ten per cent increase in damage costs from climate change. But by mid-century we'll probably see a 500% because of changes in social variables -- namely more people with more stuff closer to harm's way.
Why is it we talk so much about cutting just a little bit, a tiny bit. If every did the Kyoto Protocol we could probably cut about half a percentage point here, but if we focussed on this bit, the big one, we could probably by changing social variables cut the damage impact somewhere between 250 and 400 percentage points. We could possibly even make it negative, leaving future generations better off. How? We don't even have that conversation right now because everybody is focussed on cutting carbon emissions. But if we actually want to help people not be killed or injured or having damage from climate change, there are much simpler ways that we could go about doing that. One of the strongest ones would be to stop subsidising insurance -- which is done for instance in Florida -- which essentially encourages people to build irresponsibly. We should have better building codes, better enforcement of building codes, zoning...there's lots of different ways that we can achieve dramatic cuts in damage impact.
We still need to fix global warming, and that's the third point I'd like to talk about. Let's look at how we should actually go about fixing global warming. Well the problem is the current approach is broken, and it's been broken for the last 20 years. We actually went to Rio in 1992 and promised to cut carbon emissions. We did no such thing. We overshot ourselves about 12%. And we went to Kyoto and promised even more and did no such thing, overshot that by 25%. Then went to Copenhagen and actually expected to do more. And of course if failed totally. And yet everyone went to Mexico last year and said hey, let's try again. And they're going to go to South Africa this year and try again, and then to Rio as the 20th anniversary. At some point you've got to stop repeating your mistakes over and over again.
Why is this happening? Because the current approach is essentially saying let's cut a lot of carbon right now, which is fairly expensive and does fairly little good even a long time into the future. Take Kyoto. If everyone had done Kyoto the cost -- and this is the average of all the macroeconomic models -- would have been $180 billion a year. Yet the net reduction in temperature by the end of the century would have been immeasurable. Of course we didn't do that at all, so it's even more immeasurable.
So the central point remains: why are we spending that much money on doing that little good? Yet that's what we keep doing. The only promise for 2020 on the books is the EU promise, the 2020 decision that we're going to cut 20% below 1990 levels by 2020. But the cost -- again across all the macroeconomic models -- is indicated to be about $250 billion a year. Yet when the EU has spent $250 billion every year for the rest of the century -- $20 trillion -- the net effect will be to reduce temperatures by one twentieth of one degree centigrade.
We won't be able to measure the impact of having spent $20 trillion by the end of the century. I would argue that's a pretty poor policy. And the economists actually concur, if you do the analysis it turns out that for every dollar the EU spends, we avoid globally about three cents of climate damage. That's a poor way to spend a dollar. It didn't do no good but you certainly didn't do very much good.
We could do much more good, but let me just...one more point...talk about the two degrees centigrade which everyone including Australia signed up to, the idea that temperatures shouldn't rise two degrees above pre-industrial levels. The cost of that is going to be a phenomenal $40,000 billion by the end of the century. And is, by the way, is if everyone does the smartest thing possible. This is 13% of global GDP. Of course that's not going to happen. But even if we did, every dollar spent would only do about two cents of climate good. That's a bad way to put it. And of course remember again if we relax the assumption they're going to do it smartly, politicians are going to do this co-ordinately and smartly with all the efficient instruments across the century across all continents, the cost could easily dramatically increase.
So the fundamental problem here is the correct set of approaches simply does not work because it's saying let's do very expensive things that'll do very little good 100 years from now. That's why they're failing. And to the extent that we're doing, we're simply wasting our money. And so I would like to take you into an idea of saying is there a smarter way, and yes there is. Before I do that I'd like to give you one metaphor which I think in many ways resonates with how we think about global warming. It's the polar bear. If you see a picture of a polar bear you think about global warming. They look really cute. They are really cute unless you're close to them. But the point of course here is to recognise are polar bears in danger? Well in a sense, yes. Polar bears will have a harder time, with diminishing and eventually disappearing summer Arctic ice. So there is a problem. But I think there's two things most people don't recognise about polar bears. One is that they're certainly not in peril right now. Polar bear populations globally have actually increased, probably quadrupled over the last 50 years. So polar bears are by no means in danger right now, but there is a problem in the future, one that we need to fix, and we need to ask ourselves how we're going to go about doing that. But the only solution that you're being offered, to tackle global warming, to help polar bears is to cut carbon emissions.
Let's just go down that line and say well how much will that actually help? If everyone implemented the Kyoto Protocol, which is 20 times more than what the world has managed to do. If everybody did that how many polar bears would we save? Turns out you'd save about one polar bear for each year. Now I like polar bears. I'm happy to save a polar bear, maybe even at the cost of a couple of hundred billion dollars. But it strikes me as odd that we don't have a conversation about the fact that every year we shoot polar bears. And not just a few. Every year the world shoots somewhere between 300 and 500 polar bears. I don't know about you, but if we want to help polar bears maybe we should stop shooting 300 polar bears first. Not only would it be a couple of hundred billion dollars cheaper, but it would also be better for 299 polar bears.
And that's the real point of this conversation. If you care about these individual issues, make sure you actually care about them and care about them smartly. This does not mean we shouldn't also fix global warming, but we should have the same attitude and start talking about what would actually work. And let me get to that and then I'll shut up. Fundamentally I help ask some of the world's top climate economists, including three Nobel laureates, what are the smartest ways -- and the stupidest ways -- to deal with climate change. And they basically told us the current approach is incredibly stupid, that's the numbers that you saw, the two or three cents back in the dollar for the Kyoto style approach. Don't do those.
What they told us, on the other hand, was the smartest long-term way to fix global warming: dramatically increase research and development into green energy research. Fundamentally they said spend 2.2% of GDP into research and development into non-carbon emitting energy technologies. The amazing thing is that that would be half the cost. It would be globally about $100 billion, about $1.6 billion for Australia. It would be half the cost of Kyoto and fifty times more than what the world is spending today. The simple trick here is to recognise why aren't we changing to a green economy? Because it's expensive. If we could make green energy much cheaper, preferably cheaper than fossil fuels, everyone would switch, including the Chinese and the Indians. Not because they were green, not because we forced them to through an elaborate arrangement like the Kyoto Protocol, but simply because innovations had made them cheaper.
So the whole point here is to recognise the solution has to be make green energy cheaper rather than try to make fossil fuels so expensive nobody wants them. That's the trick. And the amazing thing is -- I'm talking about solar panels -- but we should look at a broad range of different solutions, and there are lots of smart people out there working on these solutions. Now they're not any of them cost-effective right now, which is why it's still very costly to change. But once one or a few of them become cost-effective, everyone will switch. That's why this also turns up: investing dramatically in research and development will make global warming solved in the medium term, and the beautiful thing is for every dollar spent on research and development you'll do about $11 of climate good. You'll avoid $11 of climate damage. That's 500 times more good than the current approach that only avoids two or three cents of climate damage. The fundamental point is to say instead of trying to make fossil fuels so expensive that nobody wants it, which will never work politically and is economically a very poor strategy, make green energy so cheap everyone wants it. If we innovate the price down to the point where it's cheaper than fossil fuels, we will have one. Turns out that's about 500 times more effective than the current approach, so we can spend less money -- which everyone loves -- and fix much more of the problem.
Thank you very much. [Applause]
Paul Comrie-Thomson: That was Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Sceptical Environmentalist and Cool It, speaking last week in Melbourne. We've got time for a number of quick questions which, for reasons of brevity, I'll paraphrase.
The first questioner during the Q&A session asked about nuclear energy for Australia.
Bjorn Lomborg: One of the reasons why I don't advocate nuclear up-front is partly because it's very often used to just annoy the Greens. It's sort of the question that you ask greens because they didn't like it before but now they like it because it's not contributing to global warming. But I think the real point here is to recognise that nuclear is just not commercially viable right now. People tell you otherwise, if you look, for instance, in the US, but that's only if you assume that you've basically written off all of your investments already. If you look at the estimates even from the nuclear industry with their investments, the estimate is it's about twice as costly as the cheapest fossil fuels, and if you look at the greens' assessment it's about three times as costly.
So the real point here is nuclear as we see it here today is just not economically viable. And I'd love to...I don't know whether we should engage in conversation like that, but let me just very briefly...if you look at the investment calculations that have been shown both from the US nuclear industry and many others -- I'm not quite sure where you're sitting -- it's very clear that they're just not cost competitive. They are only if you assume that you've already written off virtually all of your investment. Now if you talk to...and I've talked to Nathan Myhrvold, Bill Gates, they're investing heavily in fourth generation nuclear power, which is essentially saying that we can basically use the waste of other nuclear power stations and they will be cheaper than fossil fuels. I'm saying great, that would be wonderful. I want to see that. That's one of the innovations that we can have. Only we have to remember that was what we were told with the other three generations of nuclear power as well.
So I think this is going to be a race between a lot of different technologies and we shouldn't pick one, we should invest in research and development of all of those and once one of them is cheaper we should go for it.
Paul Comrie-Thomson: Bjorn Lomborg has argued for over a decade that increased R&D, rather than attending to carbon emissions, will deliver viable solutions. But how should such funding be organised. And increased research and development seems such an obvious approach so why isn't it happening now?
Bjorn Lomborg: I'd be happy to spell out very briefly the institutional framework I think. We have a very good framework already that's funding research and development. We do that through what in the US is known as national science foundations. Essentially peers granting very small sets of money to other researchers based on the innovative concepts of what they're proposing. I think the fundamental point is we should also take a page out of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation playbook. They've essentially said what are the 50 things we'd most like to see solved? I think we should say what are the 50 to 100 things we'd like to see achieved over the next ten years. Set out X prices to get them, and that would be an amazing way to energise both private researchers, government funded researchers, and also just interested citizens.
But the real point here -- and I'd like to get back to that because you say how come that people are not doing that? Come on, it's so obvious. Why aren't we doing it? And I think there's a much more important reason before that, and that's why I don't really care all that much about setting out the institutional framework, because I think it comes down to us. The fundamental point here is to remember why do politicians talk about global warming? They also care about it, but because it gets them votes. That's what drives politicians. And so let's be honest...do you guys remember Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2005? He was the king of global warming because he promised to bring California into the Kyoto Protocol essentially in 2020. Ten years after he was out of the governorship. We all knew that. But we all applauded, because he was such a nice guy. He was promising to save the world. But essentially he was saying I solemnly pledge to have someone else do all the hard work for me in ten years time. And we believed him. And of course Tony Blair, 1997 came into office, spent 10 years to tell the British people how he was going to cut carbon emissions. He did no such thing. They increased 3%. They promised to cut them 15%. It didn't matter, because he said all the right things.
Now of course Merkel, Obama, everybody else, probably also your leader, is saying 'we're going to cut carbon emissions. We're going to cut by mid-century 50%, 80%,' come up with a number. Of course not only are they no longer going to be in office, but they're probably no longer going to be here. So it's a very, very simple promise to make. I'm going to save the world. That sounds a lot better than saying I'm going to increase investment in research and development up to 0.2% of GDP. That just sounds technical. You want to show stuff. You want to show all the amazing solar panels, which is what the Germans do. They're the biggest consumers of solar panels in the world per capita. Yet the total expense is going to be about $75 billion. The net effect will be to postpone global warming by the end of the century by about 7 hours. So they'll do no good for a very substantial amount of money. But it makes everyone feel good in Germany.
So we've got to stop applauding politicians making these nice-sounding promises that don't actually do any good. And of course then we also have to remember, if you spend money efficiently there's nobody who gets a lot of the pie. But if you spend it inefficiently, everybody gets a go at it. I come from Denmark. We produce lots of windmills. Vesta's, the biggest producer of windmills in the world, loves this conversation and it's not hard to see why, because they get lots of subsidies from our government, from around the EU, but probably also from your government. So they love all this discussion. They want you to spend more money on subsidies. So we need to recognise that both politicians and many businesses want us to be inefficient. So unless we stop applauding when the politicians are making these empty promises, and unless we stop applauding companies when they say ooh, we're so green, give us more money -- we're not really going to get started.
So I think that's the way we need to go down, and once we've gotten that, then we can start talking about just exactly how we're going to make the investment in research and development in the most efficient way possible.
If you'll just allow me to speak very briefly more about that, one of the reasons why we don't spend money on research and development -- you'd imagine we do, I mean we talk a lot about green energy, everybody talks about we should do something about green energy. But notice, if you make promises that you're going to cut carbon emissions in another five or ten years, you're not going to make solar panels efficient. You're simply going to go for a technology that's already there or almost there and implement lots and lots of it, which of course is what we've done in Europe and many other places.
There is one other thing you're going to do. You're going to cheat, which we've also done in Europe. You're going to basically buy ineffective carbon offset schemes like the ones that we've done in China, and/or you're going to try to fudge the numbers by saying which date should you start from, or update what you actually estimate that you emitted, for instance in 1990. Or you're going to start including land change use or all those kinds of things. If you look at what happens...ever since the Kyoto Protocol was agreed in 1997 all the other meetings, at least up till 2007, 2008 -- so for ten years they're all about essentially diluting the agreement that you've made in Kyoto.
So you end up spending lots of money on technology that's already there or lots of money on making essentially fudges. Instead we need to start talking about how we're going to make long-term investments. And it's very simple. We do that in medical care. We don't expect medical companies, pharmaceuticals, to be spending money on blue sky research that will only come to fruition in 20 to 40 years. We do that through public money. That's why we spend money on blue sky research in Nobel prizes. Then of course, once we get close to marketability, pharmaceuticals take over and they're much, much better at doing that. And we need to recognise that it's the same social benefit for investment in for instance green technology. That if I come up with a brilliant plan to reduce the cost of solar panels by a factor of two, it would be brilliant for humankind. But of course I won't make any money, because it will go from being ten times as expensive as fossil fuels to only five times. I still can't sell it. And so the point is the downstream benefit is socially great, but it's very, very hard to recoup the investment on the patents. That's why we need public investment, and that's where it comes in as a good investment almost no matter what, as long as you accept that there is some part of human-induced global warming.
No comments:
Post a Comment