3E Intelligence

Bjørn Lomborg may call himself an environmentalist, but he surely is no ecologist. His latest efforts to remain in the spotlight of the media (and earn in the process huge speaking fees at business conferences) focuses on climate engineering. Tricking several media into believing the climate skeptic had changed sides, Lomborg helped launch the new study of his Copenhagen Consensus Center (brilliant use of the word consensus BTW) on geo-engineering last week.

The study (undertaken by Eric Bickel of the University of Texas at Austin and Lee Lane of the American Enterprise Institute) is an economic evaluation of benefits and costs of starting R&D on climate engineering. Bickel and Lane come to the conclusion that several technical solutions to tinkering with the Earth’s climate would probably be less expensive than current carbon mitigation policies. It has to be said that the study mentions on several occasions that there might be unintended consequences to these experiments which could not be economically valued. The Copenhagen Consensus Center has also given two other scientists the opportunity to look at the Bickel-Lane study and criticise its assumptions and calculations.

A few blogs have published excellent critical reactions to the Copenhagen Center analysis.

The Business Green blog (“Have Bond Villains taught us nothing about messing with the climate?”) highlights the fact that “the project would only serve to mask the effect of climate change, not reverse it by addressing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere” and “create an unprecedented political and security challenge as world leaders attempted to negotiate who gets to play God and control the technology”.

The Real Climate blog calls the study a “biased economic analysis of geoengineering” and points out a lot of scientific work which has been ignored by the study’s authors. This blog post concludes: “It may be that the benefits of geoengineering will outweigh the negative aspects, and that most of the problems can be dealt with, but the paper from Lomborg’s center ignores the real consensus among all responsible geoengineering researchers. The real consensus, as expressed at the National Academy conference and in the AMS statement, is that mitigation needs to be our first and overwhelming response to global warming, and that whether geoengineering can even be considered as an emergency measure in the future should climate change become too dangerous is not now known. Policymakers will only be able to make such decisions after they see results from an intensive research program. Lomborg’s report should have stopped at the need for a research program, and not issued its flawed and premature conclusions.”

My other main objection to the analysis promoted by “environmentalist” Lomborg is that his study misses the big picture. Even if more geo-experimenting would be able to help in the climate change battle, it does not do anything for the other sustainability challenges that we are facing (water scarcity, peak energy, biodiversity loss etc). By continuing the hold up the promise of technological fixes, Lomborg provides the illusion that we can overcome all sustainability challenges without having to question our current way of life. I am sure the Danish wonderboy will get lots of new speaking opportunities as a result of this “convenient” study.

Wanna bet that even the next European Commission will suddenly find research money for the geo-engineering illusion?