My esteemed Keloland colleague Cory Heidelberger (whose last name always presents me with a challenge) has a fine post referring to Bjørn Lomborg's piece in the Wall Street Journal. It is excellent for two reasons: first, Cory does a pretty good job of trying to see the questions from two sides and he acknowledges the rhetorical excesses on both sides; and second, Cory agrees with me about Lomborg, which means that he is surely right.
Lomborg has attempted to forge a common sense view of global problems, grounded in realistic estimates of costs and benefits. I have long admired his work. He acknowledges that global warming is a problem, that it due in some significant measure to human activity. But he thinks that the costs of reversing global warming are prohibitive, and that much cheaper and more practical measures can do a lot more good. For a fraction of the hundreds of billions that the Kyoto treaty would have cost (if anyone were abiding by it), we could deliver safe drinking water, vitamins, etc., to millions of people around the world.
I hadn't seen anything by Lomborg on terrorism before, but as usual he gives us a picture of just how expensive counter-terrorism measures are, and how marginal are the benefits. I think that this is one topic on which Lomborg's analysis is misleading. It's no doubt true that the death toll from terrorist acts is marginal compared to more familiar problems. Lomborg cites 420 deaths each year from "transnational terrorism," and that compares with 30,000 deaths of U.S. highways. But terrorism has a much more profound psychological impact on a nation that crunched up Corollas, just as an airline crash has a much bigger impact than a bad holiday weekend on I 29. Governments are compelled to respond to terrorism without doing a simple cost-benefit analysis. But Lomborg is right to insist that we reckon the costs.
I would note, though Cory does not, that Lomborg is a bete noire of the world left. He has had to defend himself against charges of intellectual dishonesty before the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty, a scary sounding institution if ever there was one. There is no question that the charges were politically motivated. I trust that Cory and I are reasonably safe from the DCSD. But trying to maintain some common sense on topics like global warming looks like heresy to the true believers.
I have been posting about global warming on my blogs for several years. I have found the evidence compelling that we were, at least until recently, in a long term global warming trend. I thought the evidence convincing, until recently, that human activity was a significant factor. I think the current cooling period raises serious questions about the climate models that cannot account for it. But I have also argued, rightly it still seems to me, that there is nothing we can do to halt the human contributions to global warming. With the growing economies in China and India, there is no way the rest of the world can reduce carbon emissions enough to make a difference, and we just aren't going to strangle our own economies. So it only makes sense, as Lomborg has argued, to spend our energies and monies on preparing for the effects of future warming.
Cory issues this challenge:
So how about a deal: let's drop the War on Terror and global warming as rhetorical bludgeons. Better yet, let's cut funding funding for both issues by half and dedicate that money to fighting disease and hunger. Any takers?
That is shrewd, and I applaud. I am sure that cutting anti-terrorism funds by half would be way too risky for any government to try it. But I am sure that directing a lot of the money we say we ("we" being the developed world) are going to spend to stop global warming toward more manageable problems would do a great deal of good.
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