Comments on: Copenhagen Con ?

By: John Quiggin

John Quiggin — Tue, 25 May 2004 21:22:52 +0000

dd, I’ve set out my concerns in advance because an ex post assertion that a process was rigged is bound to be dismissed as sour grapes. More generally, it’s striking that, in all the comments thus far, no one has questioned the premise that the results of this exercise are utterly predictable and that they will have almost nothing to do with the purported task of ranking development goals.

By: Giles

Giles — Tue, 25 May 2004 19:41:30 +0000

First you attack Lomborg on the basis of his cositings then you wrote “Most economists who have looked at the ecological costs of climate change conclude that, while they are almost impossible to evaluate in monetary terms, they are sufficient to justify substantial action. ” So you’re really saying that even if my figures are wrong, I’m still right. And then youlaugh at Nordhaus when he tries to value the ecosystem, but come up with no estimate yourself. Sure Lomborg’s challenge for a ranking is crude, but to argue against his rankings people are going to have to think about valuing all these intangible issues; that I think is its real purpose. So it’s a challenge to all these communities out three to either put up or shut up. Which cant be bad.

By: Sebastian Holsclaw

Sebastian Holsclaw — Tue, 25 May 2004 17:31:41 +0000

My memory of the Kyoto is that the market method you discuss was not on the table as the main implementation method. Did that change dramatically at some point? Or am I just wrong?

By: derrida derider

derrida derider — Tue, 25 May 2004 06:15:47 +0000

Oferchrissakes, John – no, the Copenhagen Consensus project is hardly likely to revolutionise the world, yes it may have an ideological cast (though I’d be very reluctant to dismiss in advance the output of some of the people on it), and yes one of the reasons it will not revolutionise the world is because foreign aid is a trivial part of world GDP (but isn’t the project in part an attempt to change that?). But none of that means that it must be a dishonest setup – given the panel participants I’d lay quids its output is a lot better than the Global Conscience love-in. Why don’t you wait and see what they actually say before you criticise it? PS: I agree with zak that the enviromentalist response to Lomborg has played the man rather than the ball far too much – that special issue of Scientific American in particular was a disgrace.

By: John Quiggin

John Quiggin — Tue, 25 May 2004 05:21:21 +0000

Bill, there’s a switch going on here with the meaning of “the world”. Obviously, global warming is a problem for the world, but it’s a problem caused mainly by the developed world and one that will have to be fixed by the developed world. It’s pretty clear if you look at the Copenhagen consensus that what is meant by “the world” there is the developing world. Problems like terrorism and the risk of nuclear war don’t appear in their list, for example, except as they impinge on poor countries. And there’s no suggestion in the Copenhagen setup of a genuinely global approach. It’s taken for granted that we’re talking about the allocation of aid budgets that are trivial in relation to the income of rich countries.

By: Bill Carone

Bill Carone — Tue, 25 May 2004 04:22:28 +0000

“No-one except Lomborg has raised the suggestion that mitigating climate change should be addressed in the context of aid to developing countries. … a report on development priorities that laid great stress on the fact that climate change wasn’t the top one would seem odd to say the least.” I am very confused (that, at least, is obvious :-) I look at the Consensus site, and it says: “The world is faced with a countless number of challenges such as diseases, environmental degradation, armed conflicts and financial instability. … Ten challenges representing some of the world’s biggest concerns have been identified.” Let me make some claims: 1) Global warming has to be on this list, no matter what? If it weren’t, there are scads of pundits who would ask for Lomborg et. al. to be shot, right? 2) I am not an expert, but I suspect that if people were to rank ten of the world’s biggest concerns, global warming would be high on their lists. 3) If the result gives a low rank to global warming, then that would be newsworthy (because of 2), and should be publicized. It might be (again because of 2 and the current popularity of talking about global warming) the most newsworthy thing to come out of the study. So, here seems to be an explanation of why global warming has been included, and why, if it is ranks low, that a report would emphasize it. I don’t see why 1,2, or 3 necessarily shows that Lomborg is being tricky.

By: Zak Catem

Zak Catem — Tue, 25 May 2004 03:33:24 +0000

Absolutely. No argument at all on the economics of the situation. Economists have had no trouble dismantling Lomborg’s arguments about climate control, pretty much from the day that the book was released. And I suppose I should be satisfied by that, since Lomborg claims to be basing his case around economic arguments. Nevertheless, I still feel a little let down by the poor showing I saw from prominent environmentalists. Pimm, at the very least, should have been able to easily refute much of what Lomborg said about deforestation and biodiversity, since he’s spent a considerable portion of his career in studying those problems. In the responses he made, he seemed to spend more time playing the man, and not the ball. It seemed to me that Lomborg offered the environmental lobby an ideal opportunity to respond authoritatively to their critics, and I’m disappointed that they preferred to undermine their own credibility by hurling invective and trying Lomborg for scientific dishonesty in an academic kangaroo court.

By: John Quiggin

John Quiggin — Tue, 25 May 2004 02:30:52 +0000

zak, for a start I’d restate the point I made in the previous post, and at more length here Key extract: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change cites a range of model estimates of the costs of implementing Kyoto using market mechanisms. They show that, with a global system of emission rights trading, the cost of implementing Kyoto would range from 0.1 per cent to 0.2 per cent of GDP. “Lomborg dismisses global emissions trading as politically infeasible because it would involve the redistribution of billions of dollars to developing countries (page 305). But then he turns around (page 318) and attacks alternative ways of implementing Kyoto by suggesting that the billions required could be better spent – by redistributing them to developing countries.” Either way you resolve this contradiction, Lomborg’s case against Kyoto collapses.

By: Zak Catem

Zak Catem — Tue, 25 May 2004 00:56:56 +0000

Well, of course we know what the outcome of the Copenhagen Consensus will be. We can also make a fairly solid prediction about the priorities of the Global Conscience symposium. So what? What I’d like to see is a more coherent response from Lomborg’s detractors this time than we saw when his book was released. Right or wrong, the reactions of prominent environmentalists like E.O. Wilson and Stuart Pimm left me wondering if they actually had any solid criticisms to make. Lomborg may be nothing but a shill for industry, but the green movement lets itself down when it rejects plausible, persuasive counter-arguments in favour of furious name-calling.

By: John Quiggin

John Quiggin — Mon, 24 May 2004 23:15:26 +0000

Bill and others are missing the point. No-one except Lomborg has raised the suggestion that mitigating climate change should be addressed in the context of aid to developing countries. Here’s a standard list of Millennium Goals, in which climate change doesn’t even get a mention. The sustainability heading includes Lomborg’s favorite stalking horse, clean water, but has nothing on climate change. This isn’t surprising. The most immediate consequences of climate change, such as species extinction, are of more concern to rich countries than to poor ones, and rich countries will bear all the costs of mitigation for decades to come (in fact, in a typically sneaky trick, Lomborg in TSE rules out low-cost options like emissions trading because they would involve transfers of billions of dollars to poor countries, which he says is politically infeasible). In the light of the above, a report on development priorities that laid great stress on the fact that climate change wasn’t the top one would seem odd to say the least. I think we all know that’s going to be the headline coming out of the Copenhagen consensus.

By: Sebastian Holsclaw

Sebastian Holsclaw — Mon, 24 May 2004 22:54:34 +0000

“It’s also strange how he always reminds us that the forecasts of the cost of global warming are uncertain, but then doesn’t mention the estimates of the costs of stopping it are also uncertain.” That is because the uncertainty points in different directions. In order to get to very costly scenarios of global warming you have to go with the less likely ones. The uncertainty tends toward the lest catastrophic outcomes. With the cost of government programs it is highly likely that costs are underestimated (in almost all cases the costs grow dramatically when compared with the forecasts). If both of the uncertainties go toward their more likely outcomes you get far fewer costs for global warming and far greater expenditures from the government.

By: Matt Weiner

Matt Weiner — Mon, 24 May 2004 20:31:54 +0000

Lomborg: The cost of the Kyoto Protocol will be at least $150 billion a year, and possibly much more. If we were to go even further — as many suggest — and curb global emissions to their 1990 levels, the total net cost to the world would be about $4 trillion extra — comparable to the cost of global warming itself. I don’t detect uncertainty there, except at the top end. If he allows uncertainty about cost in his book, he doesn’t seem to allow it in his pronouncements to the public—which suggests that those pronouncements are special pleading rather than an attempt to get at the truth. (And it’s not because Lomborg lacked space to explain the nuance. If he wanted to indicate uncertainty about the cost side, he could’ve changed “would” to “could.” “c” takes up less space than “w.”)

By: MattB

MattB — Mon, 24 May 2004 20:26:43 +0000

What Bill said. Funny how everyone seems to jump on Lomborg as worse than Bush, with everything he says inherently distrusted, when the most parsimonious [sp] explanation is that he is truly concerned about making a better world with limited resources and attention. IMO.

By: Birgitte

Birgitte — Mon, 24 May 2004 19:02:35 +0000

For some reason the discussion is cut in the middle. The second half is found at http://www.dr.dk/nyheder/tv/2sektion/ – there’s a grey box with the text: “2. sektion. Hver søndag kl. 22:50 Se seneste udsendelse” – choose the ‘se seneste udsendelse’ link.

By: Birgitte

Birgitte — Mon, 24 May 2004 18:34:21 +0000

As a response to Lomborg’s conference, a parallel conference ‘Global Conscience’ is taking place in Copenhagen at the same time (http://www.globalconscience.dk/indeng.htm). Also, a rather interesting and long discussion between participants in the two conferences was broadcasted yesterday on Danish tv (in English); if anyone’s interested it can be found at http://www.dr.dk/nyheder/tv/deadline_dr2/article.jhtml?articleID=43080 – choose the “22:30 søndag” link, and go fast forward for ca 7 minutes.