Bjorn Lomborg pushes his usual anti-Kyoto line in the Oz
will be extremely expensive and will have only a negligible effect. The global cost will be large: the estimates from all macro-economic models show a cost of $US150 billion ($224 billion) to $US350 billion every year. At the same time, the effect on extreme weather will be marginal: the climate models show that Kyoto will merely postpone the temperature rise by six years from 2100 to 2106. Most global warming problems will occur in the Third World, yet these countries have many other, more serious, problems with which to contend. For the cost of Kyoto, in 2010, we could permanently solve the biggest problem in the world รถ we could permanently provide clean drinking water and sanitation for every person in the world. Should we not deal with the most pressing problems for real people first?
What Lomborg doesn’t say here is that these scary estimates refer only to the case when Kyoto is implemented without emissions trading. With emissions trading, the net cost to the world would be much smaller, but Lomborg says this is politically infeasible because it would require big transfers from rich to poor countries.
In other words, we can’t implement Kyoto efficiently because we would have to give lots of money to poor countries and that’s politically impossible. But, as an alternative to implementing inefficiently we should give lots of money to poor countries.
I’ve pointed out this contradiction ad nauseam, but consistency is not a major issue for Lomborg or for his right-wing employers (the nastiest government in recent Danish history) and promoters.
