Bjorn Lomborg, the man who used to be the world’s most well-known climate
sceptic, has resurfaced in the Wall Street Journal and Channel 4 with a new way to be wrong on climate change.
I must admit being somewhat jealous of Bjorn Lomborg. Here’s a man who has
managed to create not just a successful career, but something of a global media
empire, off the back of nothing more than being consistently and publically
wrong. Not consistently wrong in the sense of having defended a consistent
position which is wrong, but in the sense of holding a wide variety of
different positions which have all been consistently wrong.
I, on the other hand, have devoted my entire life to being right. Where is my
global media empire? You’re looking at it. Where is the justice? Still looking
for it.
Anyway, we’ve just entered the neolombic era, where the key message is -
We shouldn’t try to cut emissions, because the technology isn’t ready.
This succeeds the hopelessly outdated mesolombic position –
We shouldn’t try to cut emissions,
because the money is needed elsewhere.
Which itself succeeded the paleolombic position –
We shouldn’t try to cut emissions,
because climate change isn’t a big deal.
Which supplanted the short-lived and little-remembered proto-lombic position –
We shouldn’t try to cut emissions,
because climate change probably isn’t happening.
So Lomborg is following the climate denial trend and being wrong about clean
technology, its costs and benefits. He’s still wrong on climate science too, and
his climate finance figures are five times higher than official figures, and
about three times higher than the figures from what Lomborg himself describes
as ‘the best-regarded economic models’, but no-one has time to read a
comprehensive list of all his mistakes, so let’s focus on the tech stuff.
There are two main reasons why he’s wrong. Firstly, he’s chosen the wrong date to launch this latest mistake. By quite a margin, in fact. If he’d tried this mistake ten years ago, it might have sounded plausible, but to claim now that our clean energy technologies aren’t up to the job, and we need to draw back from installation and return to the drawing board until renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels is somewhat undermined by renewables already being cheaper than fossil fuels.
Solar power became cheaper than diesel in India over a year ago and the price of solar panels is expected to continue to plummet. Meanwhile in Brazil, the gas industry is asking for state protection as it is
unable to compete with wind power, and renewable energy is cheaper than electricity from either gas or coal in Australia.
And it’s getting to a competitive scale – in Portugal 70% of their
electricity has been generated from renewables so far this year.
And this is all working according to blinkered, short-term, profit-driven
traditional economics. If you include the damage done to our climate in
your balance sheet, then renewables have been cheaper than fossil fuels for a
very long time indeed.
Of course, renewables have yet to achieve full-spectrum global dominance, but
the point is that the advances mentioned above weren’t all made in the lab, but
in factories, on construction sites, and in the global markets. It’s the
widespread installation of renewable energy which is driving the cost
reductions. If renewables were to retreat from the market to focus on R&D, at
a time when they are out-competing and replacing fossil fuels at an accelerating
rate, which sector would that really benefit?
But this is a minor error compared to Lomborg’s latest biggy. As an economist,
this one’s particularly embarrassing, as he’s failed to understand how western capitalist economies work. Not
just that demand spurs innovation, or that economies of scale reduce costs, but
a much more basic error. The markets do not necessarily go for the most efficient
option, unless someone with significant wealth and power decides they can use
that option to increase that wealth and power. If there is consensus amongst
the elite that they’re quite happy with the way things are going using the
current, less efficient option, then that’s the way we’ll carry on doing
things. Our economic system is efficient in the sense that it’s good at turning
millionaires into multi-millionaires, and multi-millionaires into billionaires,
but its ability to externalise costs and remove them from the corporate balance
sheet make it rubbish when it comes to maximinsing cost efficiency for society
in general, and it has a negative impact, that is, minimises efficiency, when
it comes to resource use. Trusting the market to invent and promote the right
energy technologies is no more sensible than trusting the market to invent and
promote the right financial instruments. They’re not condemned to certain
failure, but there’s certainly no guarantee of success.
To quote ex-energy minister Lord Hutton in Saturday’s Telegraph – “Left to its
own devices, the market would not choose to invest in capital intensive low
carbon infrastructure. This would lead us to a precarious, high carbon future
increasingly dependent on imported gas.”
And he should know. Lord Hutton is a lobbyist for the nuclear industry, which has never managed to build a power station anywhere in the world without public subsidy, and doesn’t look likely to. Yet the world still has hundreds of operating reactors, and our government wants to subsidise a few more.
It’s
funny how Lomborg’s various plans, plots and schemes vary in their premises,
analysis and focus as each one gets overwhelmed by reality, but they’re
actually all entirely consistent with each other in two ways – they’re all
wrong, and they all imply that we should burn more fossil fuels.
Perhaps that’s his secret – to be a globally celebrated climate pundit it’s not
enough just to be loudly and repeatedly wrong on the issues, you need to be
wrong in a way which promotes our increasing dependence on imported gas. You
need to be wrong in the right way.
