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Climate Change: Can We Stop It?

A review of controversial books on climate change and the environmental movement by BjÃ¸rn Lomborg and Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger.

Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming
by BjÃ¸rn Lomborg
Knopf, 253 pp., $21.00

by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger
Houghton Mifflin, 344 pp., $25.00

What We Know About Climate Change
by Kerry Emanuel
MIT Press, 85 pp., $14.95

edited by Joseph F.C. DiMento and Pamela Doughman
MIT Press, 217 pp., $19.95 (paper)



In his earlier book, The Skeptical Environmentalist , BjÃ¸rn Lomborg, a Danish statistician, attacked the scientific establishment on a number of topics, including global warming, and concluded that things were generally improving here on earth. The book was warmly received on the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal , but most scientists were unimpressed. Scientific American published scathing rebuttals from leading researchers, and its editor concluded in a note to readers that "in its purpose of describing the real state of the world, the book is a failure." A review in Nature compared it to "bad term papers," and called it heavily reliant on secondary sources and "at times â€¦ fictional." E.O. Wilson, who has over the years been attacked by the left (for sociobiology) and the right (for his work on nature conservation), and usually responded only with a bemused detachment, sent Lomborg a public note that called his book a "sordid mess." Lomborg replied to all of this vigorously and at great length, and then went on, with the help of The Economist magazine, to convene a "dream team" of eight economists including three Nobel laureates and ask them to consider the costs and benefits of dealing with various world problems. According to his panel, dealing with malaria ranked higher than controlling carbon emissions, though again some observers felt the panel had been stacked and one of the economists who took part told reporters that "climate change was set up to fail." Lomborg later conducted a similar exercise with "youth leaders" and with ambassadors to the United Nations, including the former US emissary John Bolton, with similar results.

In his new book, Cool It , Lomborg begins by saying that the consensus scientific position on climate change -- that we face a rise in temperature of about five degrees Fahrenheit by century's end -- is correct, but that it's not that big a deal. "Many other issues are much more important than global warming." In fact, he argues, it would be a great mistake either to impose stiff caps on carbon or to spend large sums of money -- he mentions $25 billion worldwide annually on R&D as an upper bound -- trying to dramatically reduce emissions because global warming won't be all that bad. The effort to cut emissions won't work very well, and we could better spend the money on other projects like giving out bed nets to prevent malaria.





As it turns out, they were almost certainly wrong. Working Group III of the IPCC, which reported at the beginning of May, said at great length that in fact it was technically feasible to reduce emissions to the point where temperature rise could be held below 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, or 2 degrees Celsius -- the point where many climate scientists now believe global warming may turn from a miserable problem into a catastrophe. As the IPCC said: "Both bottom-up and top-down studies indicate that there is substantial economic potential for the mitigation of global GHG emissions over the coming decades, that could offset the projected growth of global emissions or reduce emissions below current levels."


Moreover, the IPCC team made it clear in their May report that it was not only feasible to make these changes but economically possible as well. They calculated that if we made this energy transition, the economy would grow very slightly more slowly than before -- about 0.12 percent more slowly annually, or 3 percent total by 2030. In other words, our children would have to wait until Thanksgiving 2030 to be as rich as they would otherwise have been on New Year's Day of that year.


The IPCC report, to put it bluntly, eviscerates Lomborg's argument; maybe that's why he devotes but a single paragraph to it in the book, scoffing at "several commentators" who called the estimated reduction of 3 percent by 2030 "negligible." But though Lomborg will doubtless eventually produce a long disquisition on why he knows better than the 737 experts collaborating on the IPCC project, his bluff has been called. Consider the reaction of his old colleagues at The Economist , which only a few short years ago was underwriting his Copenhagen Consensus work. "Just as mankind caused the problem," the editors said, "so mankind can stop it -- and at a reasonable cost." The 0.12 percent a year drag on GDP? "The world would barely notice such figures," said the magazine, hardly noted for its casual attitude about economic growth.


In its editorial celebrating the IPCC report, The Economist adds a caveat. Though the new data make clear that "the technology and the economics of this problem are easily soluble," the politics of the situation are much harder. "The problem, of course, is that the numbers work only if they are applied globallyâ€¦. All the world's big emitters need to do it," and each of them will be tempted to take a pass.

It's in this light that the new book by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger is of interest, for they address the question of how to persuade Americans to take action on climate change. In October 2004, they collaborated on a provocative essay called "The Death of Environmentalism." Naming names (and quoting Martin Heidegger, Zen koans, and Abraham Lincoln), they accused the environmental movement of failing to deliver progress on global warming for a variety of reasons both structural and philosophical. The authors distributed their views at the annual meeting of the philanthropists who underwrite many of the groups they were attacking. The nastiness that followed was predictable -- a certain notoriety for the authors and a great deal of defensive reaction from leaders of environmental organizations.



In this kind of atmosphere, they argue, progressives must break away from the scripts of the New Deal and the 1960s: "The time is ripe for the Democratic Party to embrace a new story about America, one focused more on aspiration than complaint, on assets than deficits, and on possibility than limits."


Nordhaus and Shellenberger mount a spirited attack, for instance, on Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a leading environmentalist -- but also a leading opponent of developing wind turbines in Nantucket Sound. It's not just that he's a rich man who doesn't want to look at windmills off the deck of his summer home, they insist; for them, he's a telling reminder of the problems that arise "when one imagines that there is a thing called nature or the environment that is separate from and superior to humans, and that this "thing" is best represented by those who live nearest to it."

Environmentalists become, in this telling, champions of the static. Opponents of windmills such as Kennedy "end up functionally championing the continued dependence of Cape Cod and other Massachusetts communities on a nineteenth-century fuel source to heat their homes and generate electricity."

In the same way, other groups worried about views or noise or density "end up blocking the transformation of American communities into vibrant, creative, and high-density cities like New York that are far more sustainable and livable than endless megalopolises like Los Angeles."

Scornful of well-heeled environmentalists, they also attack advocates of "environmental justice" who have complained that their communities are the victims of disproportionate pollution. They contest the data, and argue that smoking and eating bad food are much bigger problems for minority communities. In dealing with asthma, for example, the authors, instead of concentrating on emissions from diesel buses, recommend working to improve "housing, health care, daycare, parenting classes, and violence prevention," which may actually do more to reduce the problem. Such reforms would deal more directly with the goals that residents of the inner city cited when questioned in the surveys of Nordhaus and Shellenberger: "jobs, crime, health care, housing." Over and over again, in a wide variety of settings, they make the same point: environmentalists have to take a much wider view of the world. If you don't want the rainforest in Brazil cut down, you need to be working in the favelas of SÃ£o Paulo to prevent the conditions that cause people to migrate toward the Amazon in search of a better life.


The question becomes how best to do that. Citing their research that shows Americans are "aspirational," they advise against anything that smacks of limits. It's when economic growth is really booming, they insist, that we become confident enough to do things like control pollution. They summarize at some length Benjamin Friedman's powerful recent argument for economic expansion, The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth , with its conclusion that good times bring out empathy and generosity in Americans, and that in fact environmental progress has traditionally been a product of surplus -- when we felt rich, we'd spend money on cleaning the air.

Unfortunately, at the moment growth means burning more fossil fuel. As Friedman acknowledged (though Nordhaus and Shellenberger don't include this crucial quote in their retelling), CO2 is "the one major environmental contaminant for which no study has ever found any indication of improvement as living standards rise." How can that fact be faced? How to have growth that Americans want, but without limits that they instinctively oppose, and still reduce carbon emissions? Their answer is: investments in new technology. Acknowledge that America "is great at imagining, experimenting, and inventing the future," and then start spending. They cite examples ranging from the nuclear weapons program to the invention of the Internet to show what government money can do, and argue that too many clean-energy advocates focus on caps instead: "Neither Democratic leaders in Congress nor Democratic presidential candidates can convincingly speak to American greatness as long as they refuse to put their money where their mouths are."


The antipathy of Shellenberger and Nordhaus to placing limits on carbon emissions, an antipathy based on their fervent belief in what they hear in their surveys, locks them into accepting slower progress than is necessary and possible. No one thinks we can stop global warming, but the IPCC data makes it clear that it is still possible -- if we begin immediately and take dramatic steps to limit carbon emissions -- to hold it below the thresholds that signal catastrophe. The authors concede too much to the enemies of regulation, a concession they're willing to make partly because they've convinced themselves that clinging to the static biological world we were born into is impossibly conservative. Global warming, they write, "will force human societies to adapt in all sorts of ways, not the least of which could be bioengineering ourselves and our environments to survive and thrive on an increasingly hot and potentially less hospitable planet."

This is improbable; indeed it sounds flaky.




In the best essay from the collection edited by Joseph DiMento and Pamela Doughman, the New York Times climate reporter Andrew Revkin makes it clear that finally (and no small part thanks to his own reports) the press and television are starting to do exactly that. One of the most important jobs of journalists at the moment, he writes, is "to drive home that once a core body of understanding has accumulated over decades on an issue -- as is the case with human-forced climate change -- society can use it as a foundation for policies and choices."

