Bjorn Lomborg has a piece in The New York Times that skewers the Johannesburg Earth Summit. He’s right – it’s more of the same bad policy rather than really pushing for the development that the Third World desperately needs.
Sustainable Nonsense
Published
There are none so blind as those who will not see. Not believing reality can be very dangerous. The Jewish people during WWII were very much victimized by the world of “ought to be”.
The American government played into that tragedy in a very large way. There was a group of Jewish people who suffered even more than those who were gassed in the concentration camp gas chambers. These were extraordinarily brave individuals who risked their lives to smuggle out pictures of the death camps. These photographs eventually reached the American government providing proof of Hitler’s atrocities. The American government said they were fake. Why?
In the American government’s world of “ought to be”, atrocities like those shown in the photos just didn’t happen. In their world of ought to be those kinds of things simply don’t happen. The photographs had to have been faked. Sadly, the whole world learned four years later that the photographs were not faked.
Today, a young and profoundly naive young “anti-environmentalist” as risen. He tells us all is well. The Earth is fine. Overpopulation is a myth. Pollution is not a problem. We need more development not less.
Unfortunately, this fool is attracting a lot of attention. Statistician Bjørn Lomborg blatantly distorts the evidence by systematically selecting statistics to support his claims that global welfare is generally improving and environmental policy is unnecessary. In spite of its numerous errors and biases, “the Lomborg scam” (as leading biologist E.O.Wilson aptly calls it) has been welcomed by gullible or like- minded journalists and politicians.” Even the New York Times is giving him space.
In Lomborg’s world of “ought to be”, everything is fine.
It’s not that there aren’t environmental problems, it’s that they are often wildly overstated to fulfill the policy objectives of the various interest groups that trumpet them.
Case in point: DDT. The effects of DDT on the environement were wildly and grossly overstated. The banning of DDT is responsible for thousands of deaths from malaria. The environmental benefits: negliable at worst, but the human loss is nothing short of genocidal.
Another example: the Kyoto Treaty. A treaty that would increase the price of everything from food to housing by 10%. Who would be effected the most? Clearly it would be the poorest among all of us. The first rule of public policy is all public policies have negative consequences, and usually the more utopian the policy, the worse the negative effects.
Let’s look at the world situation. 10 years from now, Brazil and China will produce a significant fraction of the world’s CO2, while the United States’ share is likely to decline. The reason: technological development. Those "gas guzzling" SUVs in the United States get gas mileages that would have been unheard of a decade before. When clean energy-producing technology is developed, it will be the result of the development and technology of the Western world that the environmentalist movement seems to want to stop.
I made a few inquiries regarding the Kyoto treaty with a few of my professors, and your statistics are way off… the potential price increases would be more on the order of 1-2%, not 10%. Yet another case of conservative scare tactics in action.
Actually, the figure I had was 15%, which is probably on the high side. (That came from a Ottawa Citizen article on 12/1/2001. pg. B6, for those who want to access it via Lexis-Nexis.)
However, the Kyoto Protocol, if approved by the United States would cause a drop in GDP of between $100-$400 billion per year. That is more than the amount of private and public spending on primary and secondary education in the United States, and nearly equal to the amount spend on Social Security payments last year. The same Yale University study indicated that the costs of Kyoto would be $2.7 trillion in lost GDP in the next 10 years. The effects on other countries would be similar.
Even if Kyoto were ratified, by 2050 the UK Meteorological Office found that the reduction in expected warming trends would only be equal to .06 degrees Centigrade. In other words, a cost of $2.7 trillion to the United States alone would throw off global warming trends by a tiny fraction of a degree, a gain that would be gone by 2053.
Kyoto is the worst piece of public policy ever created, and if enforced, it would be tantamount to economic suicide for any country that attempted to abide by its emission targets.