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Sponsored by the Natural Environment Research Council |  |  | 
|  |  | | (This debate is closed and is a read-only archive) | | Lomborg's cost/benefit analyses are worthless here
[21-Nov-2001]
| Economists attempting to apply their sterile analyses to solving the global warming problem are ultimately wasting their little grey cells. Cost-benefit analysis is a useful way of thinking about a complex argument, but it is also incredibly dangerous because it spits out a 'magic number' - a cost-benefit ratio that tells us whether to act now, later or never. Believing this magic number, and worst of all using it to guide climate change policy, could make the future a dangerous and even more inequitable place for generations to come.
| Away from economists and in the realm of public and scientific debate, the crux of the argument is not cost/benefit, but risk. As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said in 1996, global warming is increasing the risk of the 'climatic dice rolling the wrong way' - and producing catastrophic changes in ocean circulations, ice-sheet collapses or runaway greenhouse effects.
| We don't know the likelihood of these occurrences (apart from that it is low), and therefore we can either take the risk that they might happen, or we can act now to try and make sure that they do not. Are we going to gamble or not? And should we really be playing dice with the only life-sustaining climate that we have been given? How much are we prepared to pay in insurance? We are all just as well-placed to think about these questions as the top economists - all questions of 'discounting' future values and incomes would disappear if we held a global referendum for how much we are prepared to pay for this climate insurance today. I bet that the global 'whip-round' insurance policy would beat the cost of implementing Kyoto hands down.
| Ben Dixon, UK
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