A view of the 21st Century: Bjorn Lomborg's "Cool It"
On October 22, 2007, Newsweek columnist George Will wrote his column entitled "An Inconvenient Price." He was dissecting a new book by economist Bjorn Lomborg entitled "Cool It - The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming. Based on that column, I got the book and have spent the intervening months reading it. Mr. Lomborg is a very lucid economist but I don't find his writing all that easy to follow. I need to visualize informaation and the are no graphs or tables in the book. In other words, this is a serious read. That's OK. The main point so far is that cooling global warming is an objective among several other worthy objectives. Lomborg says we shouldn't sacrifice the world economy for global warming without considering the negative impacts (aka suffering) it will create. His case is compelling but I am not fully convinced. He does point out how alarmists have been exploiting recent weather changes. Higher world temperature are likely to be caused by warmer night and winters rather than higher summer peak temperatures. I will have to keep reading.
Lomborg writes like he has been out to the year 2100 and returned to tell us what is out there. I would prefer he just go out to 2020. There are just many too societal interactions and too much time between now and then - 93 years. Would anyone trust predictions from 1907 about how life would be in the year 2000? I wouldn't bank on it.
I am more concerned about the next 12 years because that is when you and I, dear ABG reader, will have our biggest influence on the present and future. Will we be driving fuel cell vehicles or hybrids or walking in 2020? Judging from how many 1995 vehicles are still on the roads of the US (probably more than all our Toyota Priuses) there are still going to be millions of 2008 models looking for a fill up. If you remember 1995, you can probably think as far out as 2020. Beyond that, things get pretty cloudy for me.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Tony Belding 4:33PM (12/31/2007)
Lomborg has done a good job of applying some reason to the issue of global warming, as an antidote to the usual hysteria. Lomborg sees climate change as a manageable problem, not as the end of the world. And he's right.
I read his book along with "ZOOM: The Global Race to Fuel the Car of the Future" by Vijay Vaitheeswaran and Iain Carson. The two books, although very different in style, dovetail nicelly. Cool It paints a picture of a manageable global problem, and ZOOM shows how we could keep it manageable -- or make it much, much worse -- based on today's decisions about how we're going to power our vehicles.
In short, as conventional oil is depleted we can switch to clean energy, or we can switch to "unconventional oils" such as tar sand, oil shale and coal-to-liquids. Choosing the latter could send global CO2 emissions skyrocketing, and that's something even Lomborg, "the skeptical environmentalist", would find unacceptable.
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Damon 6:08PM (12/31/2007)
I saw Lombord on Bill Maher once, and his main point struck me as insanely short-sighted. He argued that we shouldn't automatically assume everything about global warming will be bad.
His example was that while it's estimated that there would be 10,000 more deaths due to heat in the UK per year, there would be 30,000 fewer deaths due to cold. Apparently, we should just say "screw everybody in the hotter countries."
Also, we need not concern ourselves with the millions that will be displaced by rising ocean levels and water shortages.
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BlackbirdHighway 5:37PM (12/31/2007)
The latest forecast from the government's Energy Information Administration (EIA) shows US oil consumption going up by 33% by 2030. That's based purely on an extrapolation of demand trends, and doesn't consider limits to production.
There will not be enough production to come anywhere close to meeting that demand. Most likely, production by 2030 will be less than it is now, regardless of demand. Unless we switch to alternatives quickly, oil will be very expensive, and our economy will be in a depression.
Enjoy 2008, as we will someday remember fondly the good old days of cheap gasoline.
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BlackbirdHighway 8:42PM (12/31/2007)
We don't know everything that global warming will bring. Some people take that to mean we shouldn't try to do anything about it.
To me, that's like driving at night in the fog. You don't know what's going to be in the road ahead. Isn't it a good idea to slow down?
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GreyFlcn 10:15PM (12/31/2007)
Alright, lets get this started.
1. Lomborg isn't an economist, he's got a degree in political science, and likes to dabble in statistics.
2. Lomborg makes some pretty dishonest arguments in his books.
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/9/13/105130/672
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/9/14/142514/357
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/9/17/151133/245
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GreyFlcn 10:15PM (12/31/2007)
And more:
http://www.lomborg-errors.dk/coolitA.htm
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/10/9/95151/9669
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/10/9/161717/899
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Mike Z 10:47PM (12/31/2007)
The biggest question I've always had with Global Warming is "Is it possible that it is worth it?" In that regard few seem to dare stick their toe into water on answering that one.
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Mik_Cal 12:40AM (1/01/2008)
I haven't read Lomborg but I've read descriptions of his book and critiques including quite damaging ones.
My sense is that he's marketing an emotional state attached to global warming ("cool it") and then goes looking for reasons why you should be "cool".
While "hysteria" is never helpful, "alarm" is, and if "alarm" is what is called for, we should be "alarmed". Some people don't like to feel "alarmed" but that is their personal taste: the real mind-independent world out there is not going to oblige them by remaking itself to reassure them or justify not being alarmed.
I find the science, even the toned down science of the IPCC, pretty alarming. This doesn't mean that other responses aren't "right" but it takes a lot of massaging for the data to appear "not alarming".
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GreyFlcn 12:27PM (1/01/2008)
Also blackbirdhighway,
We don't have to worry about "Peak Energy"
http://greyfalcon.net/fossilenergy.png
http://greyfalcon.net/greenenergy.png
What we have to worry about is Global Warming and Ocean Acidification (due to CO2, Smog, and Fertilizer runoff)
_
Oh yeah, and the only reason Lomborg calls himself "The skeptical environmentalist" is because he says he was a card carrying member of Greenpeace once.
Greenpeace on the other hand has no record of this.
So once again, more BS.
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watergapnomad 9:06AM (1/02/2008)
The text below captures Lomborg's central ideas, and they sound quite reasonable to me:
TIME: Why did you write Cool It?
Lomborg: Basically I think there’s a need to have two conversations. One is what is the status of global warming. Is it a hoax? Is it a catastrophe? I try to say, well, it’s neither. It’s not a hoax, not a left-wing conspiracy to raise taxes or just natural variation, as many Republicans want to say in the U.S. On the other hand, it’s not a not an unmitigated catastrophe, the end of civilization.
Of course the real fact of the matter is we don’t do very much. We promise a lot, but we don’t actually do very much. And the honest-to-God reason is it’s fairly expensive.
Rich people in rich countries will do a little, mainly for show. But most people in rich countries won’t do very much, and certainly no one in the poor countries will do anything.
My point is — and this is very, very simple — instead of cajoling people into doing something that is very expensive, which is hard, why not actually make it much cheaper? Instead of convincing more and more people to buy expensive solar panels, for instance, why not invest in research and development so that these become much cheaper — competitive with fossil fuels, or maybe even cheaper. If we could get there, we wouldn’t have to have this conversation.
Then why do R&D rather than, say, taxing gasoline so much in the U.S. that it would change consumption patterns now?
Taxing would obviously change people’s behavior. But it still has positive benefits to drive around. We could stop all traffic tomorrow if we just put a $1,000/gallon tax on gasoline. You’ve got to remember that fossil fuels have a lot of benefits. That’s why we use them.
We would make much more headway dealing with global warming simply because we would leave our kids and our grandkids, but especially the Chinese and the Indians, with much cheaper technology. Quite frankly right now they don’t care about global warming because they care about feeding their kids and curing them from infectious diseases and stuff.
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Mik_Cal 8:10PM (1/02/2008)
watergapnomad,
You've chosen a passage that shows some deceptive reasoning by Lomborg...no one is suggesting that we not do R&D to reduce the costs of clean energy. He is erecting a straw man to argue against.
Also everybody agrees that "driving around" has positive benefits (for individuals)...that's why we sometimes need restraints on some behaviors that lead to too much of a good thing. We have speed limits and speeding tickets because driving too fast is dangerous, we tax cigarettes because they tax the health system.
What he overlooks is that we need to start doing some of the things that are "good" behavior, increase energy efficiency, and use clean energy NOW. We cannot afford to wait around until the technology gets optimally cheap through R&D or other means. There are means to help speed R&D by making things more expensive through taxes and other disincentives: there is a boom in electric vehicles in Britain due to the London congestion charge, for instance and European vehicles are more fuel efficient than American vehicles because of years of very high fuel taxes.
Most advocates do not suggest only using disincentives like taxes; most people advocate a mix of incentives and disincentives. Lomborg is arguing against a straw man to make himself appear "cool" and reasonable and most of all to present a new flavor to magazine and newspaper editors to help him sell books.
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