Lomborg has boiled down his message - perhaps for cable talk shows - to a few simple points: It's cheaper and safer to accept the risks of global warming than to kick our addiction to carbon energy. Trying too hard to solve the climate crisis will cost too much and interfere with solving more immediate problems like poverty, disease, and conflict. And, lastly, if climate change really does turn out to be a big problem, the only solution will be to go to extreme geo-engineering.
Somehow, just building a clean-energy economy didn't make his list of possible solutions. He said his economist friends "all" agree that it's just "too expensive and wasteful." He did score good points on the weaknesses of both the Kyoto Protocol and current versions of cap and trade -- even resorting to quoting climatologist Jim Hansen as an ally.
But Lomborg stayed firmly rooted in the abstractions of macroeconomics, declining to challenge me when I pointed out that replacing the entire U.S. fleet of coal-fired power plants with cleaner energy (efficiency, renewables, and natural gas) would cost about as much as the $100 billion in medical costs that's imposed by those plants every year. The climate benefits would be free. Read the full report here.
Source: Carl Pope, Sierra Club, Chairman, San Francisco.
