Skeptical Environmentalist Bjørn Lomborg wrote an Op-Ed for Saturday’s New York Times. In it, he argues that the costs of cutting emissions Kyoto-style far outstrip those of investing large amounts of money in clean energy.
This year’s edition of Lomborg’s Global Crises, Global Solutions, the reports from the Copenhagen Consensus, will be available soon!
WE are often told that tackling global warming should be the defining task of our age — that we must cut emissions immediately and drastically. But people are not buying the idea that, unless we act, the planet is doomed. Several recent polls have revealed Americans’ growing skepticism. Solving global warming has become their lowest policy priority, according to a new Pew survey.
Moreover, strategies to reduce carbon have failed. Meeting in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, politicians from wealthy countries promised to cut emissions by 2000, but did no such thing. In Kyoto in 1997, leaders promised even stricter reductions by 2010, yet emissions have kept increasing unabated. Still, the leaders plan to meet in Copenhagen this December to agree to even more of the same — drastic reductions in emissions that no one will live up to. Another decade will be wasted.
Fortunately, there is a better option: to make low-carbon alternatives like solar and wind energy competitive with old carbon sources. This requires much more spending on research and development of low-carbon energy technology. We might have assumed that investment in this research would have increased when the Kyoto Protocol made fossil fuel use more expensive, but it has not. Read the full article >>
I find it funny that every 25 years these people change their minds what is happening in the environment. The 70’s: It’s cooling. before that is was warming. then cooling again. now I see reports that the earth is heading into a cooling age not because of human activity but because of the amount of sun spots on the sun. Decrease the amount of sun spots decrease the earths temp. The whole time these enviro-commies were screaming the earth is warming every planet in the solar system was warming at the same rate as the earth. Mars is warming at 4 times the rate as the earth is. Hell I guess those martians are driving their SUV’s too much.
Oh yeah by the way if we cut all moving vehicles: trains, cars, trucks, planes, etc. will only cut the carbon emissions by 15%. if we cut the whole economy then that will almost reach a decrease carbon emission by 60%. nothing will be good enough for these enviro-commies. this is about power and control. it has nothing to do with “saving” the environment.