Economists challenge Gore hypeLeave Iwo Jima to the Marines

The Janus Lecture Series at Brown concluded with an Earth Day theme presenting an unlikely triumvirate of socio-economic thinkers discussing climate change. Global Warming wreaked havoc upon the presentation with glorious spring weather filling the Pembroke Green rather than the lecture at Alumnae Hall (although weather-norming could only report that the event was quite well attended).

For those who bucked the trend and went indoors, the lecture was refreshing. The typical presentation of the purportedly controversial Bjorn Lomborg in academia has amounted to a brief caricature of his work which is then subjected to withering emotional diatribe masquerading as substantive criticism. The Janus Steering Committee instead exhibited an ability to recognize nuance in this area of debate and presented a panel of distinct, but not antithetical, ideas.

The Brown Daily Herald focused on areas of agreement amongst the speakers, which were actually more style than substance, but drew media attention to the absence of hype—a unique and newsworthy event when it comes to discussing climate change. The Herald did not really miss the point, however, as the universal absence of apocalyptic tone at this forum was the de facto answer to the question debated: “Global Climate Change: The End of the World as We Know it?”

This is not to say that Janus presented the complete range of serious scientific discourse on climate change. The only specific substantive agreement amongst all the panelists was a prejudice to the viewpoint that “global warming” is principally, or actionably, a result of human activity. There remains many serious scientists who question both the predominant attribution of current climate trends to humanity and the uncritical reliance on models that predict a self-reinforcing acceleration of effects.

If Lomborg is so conformist in this respect, what has made him so controversial? Ironically, it is his adherence to welfare economics, a progressive utilitarian brew of Pareto efficiencies compounded with a contradictory predilection to redistributive effects – think Marxist Benthamites doing cost benefit analysis.

You would not think that a gay vegetarian opining on economic justice could so readily turn the revolutionaries of the Left to reactionaries calling for his head, but Lomborg’s conclusion that there were much more important things to spend money on than global warming was heresy in the church that Gore built. Not only did this diminutive Dane have the temerity to render such a judgment, but also he had the honesty to point to the gross exaggerations of potential harms from global warming by the high priest of climate change. Indeed, these exag’gore’ations have stampeded public discourse towards the sense that CO2 challenges the 21st century the way Hitler challenged the 20th.

In an environment prone to such excesses as postulating biblical floods of 20 feet or more when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change actually predicts a sea level rise in the realm of a foot or two this century, it is little wonder that Time magazine chose to co-opt the image of Marines of the greatest generation atop Iwo Jima’s Mt. Surabachi as the missionary metaphor for the latest generation.

Lomborg’s “anti-deluvian” ruminations have earned him the moniker of “delayer”, the newest derogatory ad hominem in the climate change battle, used by believers to belittle participants in the public discourse who cannot be labeled “deniers”. In the view of these fervent global warning [sic] believers, acknowledging anthropogenic climate change but faulting Gore and others for worst case scenarism leads inevitably to delaying the anti-fossil fuel measures they deem necessary.

Unsurprisingly, given the consequentialist underpinnings of his economic philosophy, Lomborg’s best examples of hyperbole relates to this perception of welfare effects. In particular he illustrated the absurdity of fears being generated by warming-related sea level rise.

Lomborg examines social resiliency in the face of similar change in recent history, pointing out that sea level has already risen a foot well within the memory of contemporary human institutions. Indeed this rise began around the mid-1800s and is almost in the memory of contemporary humans. Thus Lomborg supposed, if we found a centenarian and asked her (statistics suggest it would be a woman) to reflect upon important changes in society over the course of her lifetime, major trends might be suffrage, communications and other technology, and transportation. But she would be highly unlikely to mention that a noticeable change in her lifetime had been in sea level.

Humdrum changes in climate and terrain are simply not major challenges to the human condition. Humans adapt. Even the drought scenarios presented by co-panelist Robert Mendelsohn, whose work has encompassed redistributive effects on precipitation, pointed out that these impacts will unfold slowly. This will allow adaptation through changes in crop choice and cultivating methods, a reliable strategy even for developing countries that may face a precipitative deficit under future climate.

When one can reasonably believe that widely available adaptations promise an inexpensive future value solution set for any likely effects of global warming in the next century, it becomes necessary to believe in the worst case in order to defend any serious investment of present value in mitigation. But Mendelsohn was sanguine in the face of such precautionary arguments. We know how to cool the earth, he said – volcanoes do it all the time by lofting particulates. If we really faced an unforeseen climate emergency, an outlier to current predictions, we can put this knowledge to work.

Finally, the audience was treated to Michael Shellenberg’s futurist proposals that we cease and desist from treating global warming as a classic pollution problem to be addressed by drastic energy rationing (an area in which he and I agree), and instead embark on a Manhattan Project to develop alternative energy.

Indeed, Shellenberg and Lomborg were almost peas in a pod on this argument, with Lomborg offering the sense that $25 billion in government energy research might do it while Shellenberg is looking for $50 billion or more.

But given their general concessions that climate change poses no immense or imminent risks and, especially with regard to Lomborg, that alternative expenditures would go much further towards improving the human condition, it is hard to see how they can justify raiding the government piggy bank for a bunch of alternative energy earmarks.

Certainly the Manhattan Project is an example of governmentally chartered collective action that yielded the very outcome towards which it was directed, and without scratching too deeply you can come to NASA and the Apollo Program for another. But rather than embolden Manhattanites, this should be a sobering realization. That would also be the NASA of the space shuttle, an agency with no mission and unable to accomplish even that.

NASA is the epitome of an agency that has to define a way to consume money in order to stay in existence. It did not write its earliest charter to reach the moon, rather the Cold War impelled the technological mission laid down by John F. Kennedy and embraced by a nation – especially in consequence of NASA’s swift recovery and notable successes in the space race. An even more explicit technological arms race gave rise to the Manhattan Project itself. And while the public could not embrace the specific goals of a secret undertaking, the country was committed to the war effort.

The circumstance with global warming is almost completely opposite. The vast majority of people is not particularly concerned and has inductively reached the same conclusion as Lomborg, that there are better things to spend their money on. Given the recent steep rise in energy prices, frustrated environmentalists turn to the energy independence mantra in support of their Manhattan Project.

But the government has made historically fickle decisions in this arena. Billions were poured into clean coal research during an era of concern over direct pollutants, only to have environmentalists scorn the result just as some productive concepts were finally emerging. It is far more likely that consumers directing their own expenditures for energy or alternatives will drive useful market responses.

There will always be a measure of regulatory risk, but this is an area where government can help. In an era when rivers are not burning, the government would do much better to loosen its regulatory grip than to go about creating new, artificial Manhattan Projects. While Lomborg does not use the titular formatulation, he nonetheless favors tens of billions flowing into the earmark soup that is alternative energy research. It is hard to square his work with the Copenhagen Consensus, which placed carbon taxes and cap-and-trade policies in the negative return on investment category, with countenancing billions in global warming expenditures.

Brian Bishop is on the Board of Advisors of the Foundation for Intellectual Diversity and directs the Foundings Project for the Ocean State Policy Research Institute. The Foundings Project uses the organic lens of the United States and Rhode Island Constitutions, their text, structure, and history, to inform debate over contemporary public policy.