Cool it!

Bjorn Lomborg's movie, that is ... I am sure my cred, which is already way low down among my esteemed faculty and administrative colleagues, will sink further if any of them should read this blog post .... after all, it is mostly heresy in typical academic circles to talk up Lomborg!

Over the summer, when The Guardian initially reported that Lomborg has done a complete reversal of his arguments, I was taken aback.  That did not seem to be consistent with Lomborg's approach at all.  Later, as I read more in other publications, it was clear that Lomborg is merely fine-tuning his arguments, which are essentially that there are lot more beneficial, and less costly, approaches that we need to address first.  Lomborg writes:

Fully implementing the Kyoto Protocol—the last comprehensive carbon cut treaty that the world had—would have cost hundreds of billions every year in lost economic growth. And even if it had been fully implemented across the century—a far shot from what has actually happened—it would only have reduced temperatures by less than one-third of one degree Fahrenheit in 100 years.
The reason for this is that alternative energy technologies are far from ready to take over from fossil fuels. If green technology is not ready to take up the slack, then forcing carbon cuts through taxes will simply hurt growth and development—particularly painful to developing nations.
World-wide public spending on research and development for clean energy technologies is a paltry $2 billion a year. Increasing this to $100 billion a year could be a game-changer. Not only would it be almost twice as cheap as the $180 billion a year cost of fully implementing Kyoto, but the effect of this kind of spending would be hundreds of times greater.