/ 2 November 2004

‘Skeptical environmentalist’ strikes again

A team of eight economists, brought together by the controversial environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg, has declared it is not worth spending money on climate change because the effects are expected to be far in the future.

Lomborg, a Danish statistician whose bestseller The Skeptical Environmentalist created storms of protest when published two years ago by throwing doubt on climate change science, is hailed by free marketeers round the world, but is reviled by many scientists.

”A stellar cast came to Copenhagen to reach consensus about how to help the world’s poor,” he said last week. ”We chose economists because they have long, valuable experience in prioritising things, and they are unaligned and impartial. We said, if we had an extra $50-billion, how should it be spent to do the most good in the world?”

They rejected spending anything on education, slums, terrorism, arms proliferation, deforestation, lack of energy or corruption.

Top of their wish list was spending money on the control of HIV/Aids. ”We found that for $27-billion we could prevent 28-million cases of HIV by 2010,” said Lomborg. ”It was the best investment that humanity could make. The benefits would be 40 times as high as the costs.”

The second-best option was to provide micronutrients for the 850-million chronically malnourished people, mainly in sub-Saharan African countries.

Controversially, the eight professors found that the third most cost-effective way to spend the money would be to promote free trade, something most of them have made their names doing.

Right at the bottom of the economists’ list of priorities for humankind came climate change, which Lomborg said was a problem of the future.

”Let’s not spend the money on problems we cannot do much about. Let’s start with the ones where we can do the most good at the loawest cost now. It’s a bad economic proposition to spend money here. Global warming will harm people in 100 years when there will be far fewer poor people. The best thing you can do is make people rich.”

”This is only an economic ranking,” he said. ”There may be other issues like justice and equity.”

”This simplistic and rather banal ranking of these problems should not be taken too seriously,” said Stephen Tindale, the director of Greenpeace. ”All these problems are linked.”

”They have come up with bizarre conclusions,” said Andrew Simms, the policy director of the New Economics Foundation. ”The simple point is that unless you act to prevent runaway climate change, all the other things that they prioritise — which are generally no-brainer good things — will be wrecked by global warming.” — Â