Bjørn Lomborg: The Decline of Renewable Energy

PRAGUE – Many today believe that renewable energy will let us get off fossil fuels soon. Unfortunately, the facts say otherwise.

According to International Energy Agency data, 13.12% of the world’s energy came from renewables in 1971, the first year that the IEA reported global statistics. In 2011, renewables’ share was actually lower, at 12.99%. Yet a new survey shows that Americans believe that the share of renewables in 2035 will be 30.2%. In reality, it will likely be 14.5%.

Solar and wind energy account for a trivial proportion of current renewables – about one-third of one percentage point. The vast majority comes from biomass, or wood and plant material – humanity’s oldest energy source. While biomass is renewable, it is often neither good nor sustainable.

Burning wood in pre-industrial Western Europe caused massive deforestation, as is occurring in much of the developing world today. The indoor air pollution that biomass produces kills more than three million people annually. Likewise, modern energy crops increase deforestation, displace agriculture, and push up food prices.

The most renewables-intensive places in the world are also the poorest. Africa gets almost 50% of its energy from renewables, compared to just 8% for the OECD. Even the European OECD countries, at 11.8%, are below the global average.

The reality is that humanity has spent recent centuries getting away from renewables. In 1800, the world obtained 94% of its energy from renewable sources. That figure has been declining ever since.

The momentous move toward fossil fuels has done a lot of good. Compared to 250 years ago, the average person in the United Kingdom today has access to 50 times more power, travels 250 times farther, and has 37,500 times more light. Incomes have increased 20-fold.

The switch to fossil fuels has also had tremendous environmental benefits. Kerosene saved the whales (which had been hunted almost to extinction to provide supposedly “renewable” whale oil for lighting). Coal saved Europe’s forests. With electrification, indoor air pollution, which is much more dangerous than outdoor air pollution, disappeared in most of the developed world.

And there is one environmental benefit that is often overlooked: in 1910, more than 30% of farmland in the United States was used to produce fodder for horses and mules. Tractors and cars eradicated this huge demand on farmland (while ridding cities of manure pollution).

Of course, fossil fuels brought their own environmental problems. And, while technological innovations like scrubbers on smokestacks and catalytic converters on cars have reduced local air pollution substantially, the problem of CO₂ emissions remains. Indeed, it is the main reason for the world’s clamor for a return to renewables.

To be sure, wind and solar have increased dramatically. Since 1990, wind-generated power has grown 26% per year and solar a phenomenal 48%. But the growth has been from almost nothing to slightly more than almost nothing. In 1990, wind produced 0.0038% of the world’s energy; it is now producing 0.29%. Solar-electric power has gone from essentially zero to 0.04%.

Yes, Denmark gets a record 34% of its electricity from wind. But electricity accounts for only 18% of its final energy use.

Europe now gets 1% of its energy from wind – less than before industrialization, when cozy windmills contributed about 2% (and ships’ sails provided another 1%). The UK set its record for wind power in 1804, when its share reached 2.5% – almost three times its level today.

Moreover, solar and wind will still contribute very little in the coming decades. In the IEA’s optimistic scenario, which assumes that the world’s governments will fulfill all of their green promises, wind will provide 1.34% of global energy by 2035, while solar will provide 0.42%. Global renewables will most likely increase by roughly 1.5 percentage points, to 14.5% by 2035. Under unrealistically optimistic assumptions, the share could increase five percentage points, to 17.9%.

So we are nowhere near switching back to renewables anytime soon. In the US, renewables accounted for 9.3% of energy production in 1949. President Barack Obama’s administration expects that number, almost a century later, to increase slightly, to 10.8% by 2040. In China, renewables’ share in energy production dropped from 40% in 1971 to 11% today; in 2035, it will likely be just 9%.

Yet we are paying through the nose for these renewables. In the last 12 years, the world has invested $1.6 trillion in clean energy. By 2020, the effort to increase reliance on renewables will cost the European Union alone $250 billion annually.

Spain now pays almost 1% of its GDP in subsidies for renewables, which is more than it spends on higher education. At the end of the century, Spain’s massive investment will have postponed global warming by 62 hours.

Current green energy policies are failing for a simple reason: renewables are far too expensive. Sometimes people claim that renewables are actually cheaper. But if renewables were cheaper, they wouldn’t need subsidies, and we wouldn’t need climate policies.

Former US Vice President Al Gore’s climate adviser, Jim Hansen, put it bluntly: “Suggesting that renewables will let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels in the United States, China, India, or the world as a whole is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny and [the] Tooth Fairy.”

The solution is to innovate the price of renewables downward. We need a dramatic increase in funding for research and development to make the next generations of wind, solar, and biomass energy cheaper and more effective.

Consider China. Despite the country’s massive investment in solar and wind, it mostly sells solar panels to Western countries at subsidized prices. Wind makes up just 0.2% of China’s energy, and solar accounts for 0.01%.

Meanwhile, China has 68% of the world’s solar water heaters on rooftops, because it is a smart and cheap technology. It needs no subsidies, and it produces 50 times more energy than all of China’s solar panels.

When green renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels, they will take over the world. Instead of believing in the Tooth Fairy, we should start investing in green R&D.

Bjørn Lomborg, an adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School, founded and directs the Copenhagen Consensus Center, which seeks to study environmental problems and solutions using the best available analytical methods. He is the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It, the basis of an eponymous documentary film.

Bjørn Lomborg: A Golden Rice Opportunity

SÃO PAULO – Finally, after 12 years of delay caused by opponents of genetically modified (GM) foods, so-called “golden rice” with vitamin A will be grown in the Philippines. Over those 12 years, about eight million children worldwide died from vitamin A deficiency. Are anti-GM advocates not partly responsible?

Golden rice is the most prominent example in the global controversy over GM foods, which pits a technology with some risks but incredible potential against the resistance of feel-good campaigning. Three billion people depend on rice as their staple food, with 10% at risk for vitamin A deficiency, which, according to the World Health Organization, causes 250,000-500,000 children to go blind each year. Of these, half die within a year. A study from the British medical journal The Lancet estimates that, in total, vitamin A deficiency kills 668,000 children under the age of five each year.

Yet, despite the cost in human lives, anti-GM campaigners – from Greenpeace to Naomi Klein – have derided efforts to use golden rice to avoid vitamin A deficiency. In India, Vandana Shiva, an environmental activist and adviser to the government, called golden rice “a hoax” that is “creating hunger and malnutrition, not solving it.”

The New York Times Magazinereported in 2001 that one would need to “eat 15 pounds of cooked golden rice a day” to get enough vitamin A. What was an exaggeration then is demonstrably wrong now. Two recent studies in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition show that just 50 grams (roughly two ounces) of golden rice can provide 60% of the recommended daily intake of vitamin A. They show that golden rice is even better than spinach in providing vitamin A to children.

Opponents maintain that there are better ways to deal with vitamin A deficiency. In its latest statement, Greenpeace says that golden rice is “neither needed nor necessary,” and calls instead for supplementation and fortification, which are described as “cost-effective.”
To be sure, handing out vitamin pills or adding vitamin A to staple products can make a difference. But it is not a sustainable solution to vitamin A deficiency. And, while it is cost-effective, recent published estimates indicate that golden rice is much more so.

Supplementation programs costs $4,300 for every life they save in India, whereas fortification programs cost about $2,700 for each life saved. Both are great deals. But golden rice would cost just $100 for every life saved from vitamin A deficiency.

Similarly, it is argued that golden rice will not be adopted, because most Asians eschew brown rice. But brown rice is substantially different in taste and spoils easily in hot climates. Moreover, many Asian dishes are already colored yellow with saffron, annatto, achiote, and turmeric. The people, not Greenpeace, should decide whether they will adopt vitamin A-rich rice for themselves and their children.

Most ironic is the self-fulfilling critique that many activists now use. Greenpeace calls golden rice a “failure,” because it “has been in development for almost 20 years and has still not made any impact on the prevalence of vitamin A deficiency.” But, as Ingo Potrykus, the scientist who developed golden rice, has made clear, that failure is due almost entirely to relentless opposition to GM foods – often by rich, well-meaning Westerners far removed from the risks of actual vitamin A deficiency.

Regulation of goods and services for public health clearly is a good idea; but it must always be balanced against potential costs – in this case, the cost of not providing more vitamin A to eight million children over the past 12 years.

As an illustration, current regulations for GM foods, if applied to non-GM products, would bar the sale of potatoes and tomatoes, which can contain poisonous glycoalkaloids; celery, which contains carcinogenic psoralens; rhubarb and spinach (oxalic acid); and cassava, which feeds about half a billion people, but contains toxic cyanogenic alkaloids. Foodstuffs like soy, wheat, milk, eggs, mollusks, crustaceans, fish, sesame, nuts, peanuts, and kiwi would likewise be banned, because they can cause food allergies.

Here it is worth noting that there have been no documented human health effects from GM foods. But many campaigners have claimed other effects. A common story, still repeated by Shiva, is that GM corn with Bt toxin kills Monarch butterflies. Several peer-reviewed studies, however, have effectively established that “the impact of Bt corn pollen from current commercial hybrids on monarch butterfly populations is negligible.”

Greenpeace and many others claim that GM foods merely enable big companies like Monsanto to wield near-monopoly power. But that puts the cart before the horse: The predominance of big companies partly reflects anti-GM activism, which has made the approval process so long and costly that only rich companies catering to first-world farmers can afford to see it through.

Finally, it is often claimed that GM crops simply mean costlier seeds and less money for farmers. But farmers have a choice. More than five million cotton farmers in India have flocked to GM cotton, because it yields higher net incomes. Yes, the seeds are more expensive, but the rise in production offsets the additional cost.

Of course, no technology is without flaws, so regulatory oversight is useful. But it is worth maintaining some perspective. In 2010, the European Commission, after considering 25 years of GM-organisms (GMOs) research, concluded that “there is, as of today, no scientific evidence associating GMOs with higher risks for the environment or for food and feed safety than conventional plants and organisms.”

Now, finally, golden rice will come to the Philippines; after that, it is expected in Bangladesh and Indonesia. But, for eight million kids, the wait was too long.
True to form, Greenpeace is already protesting that “the next ‘golden rice’ guinea pigs might be Filipino children.” The 4.4 million Filipino kids with vitamin A deficiency might not mind so much.

Bjørn Lomborg, an adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School, founded and directs the Copenhagen Consensus Center, which seeks to study environmental problems and solutions using the best available analytical methods. He is the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It, the basis of an eponymous documentary film.

Bjørn Lomborg: The End of Pasta?

 

PRAGUE – Scare stories have been an integral part of the global warming narrative for a long time. Back in 1997, Al Gore told us that global warming was making the El Niño winds stronger and more severe. That has not happened. Greenpeace and many others have told us for years that we will see more violent hurricanes. In fact, over the last six years, global hurricane energy has dropped to its lowest level since the 1970’s, while the United States has had the longest absence of severe hurricanes ever (Sandy was a “superstorm,” not a hurricane, when it hit the vulnerable East Coast in October).

But the scares do not stop there. The World Wildlife Fund declared in 2004 that polar bears would go extinct by the end of the century, and that the calamity would start in Hudson Bay, where they would stop reproducing by 2012. The bears are still reproducing. And stories abound of global warming bringing malaria to Europe or Vermont. But here, too, the evidence contradicts such fears; in fact, malaria deaths have dropped more than 25% over the last ten years.

It is understandable that pundits, worried about global warming and frustrated with the near-absence of political interest or solutions, see exaggeration as an easy way to garner attention. The problem is that when these scare stories are later shown to be wrong, people become less willing to listen even to reasonable arguments about global warming. Indeed, skepticism about global warming has gone up, not down, as the false alarms have become increasingly high-pitched.

Moreover, by casting every problem as mainly caused by global warming, the solution almost automatically becomes cutting CO2 emissions, though this often is the slowest and costliest way to achieve the least good.

Consider the newest global-warming exaggeration: an article from Newsweek shrilly claiming that rising temperatures are heralding “The End of Pasta.” All of the major grains – rice, corn, and wheat – are already suffering from global warming, the article explains, but wheat is the most vulnerable to high temperatures. So, as warming increases, we will see “shockingly high prices” for pasta and bread. Its central message is straightforward: “If humans want to keep eating pasta, we will have to take much more aggressive action against global warming.”

The argument is almost entirely wrong. Yields of all major crops have been rising dramatically in recent decades, owing to higher-yielding crop varieties and farmers’ greater use of fertilizer, pesticides, and irrigation. Moreover, CO2 acts as a fertilizer, and its increase has probably raised global yields more than 3% over the past 30 years.

But increasing temperatures will harm some crops while benefiting others. Because most crops are already grown where they do best, it is not surprising that climate models show that temperature increases will reduce yields if farmers change little or nothing. In fact, farmers will adapt, especially over the course of a century. They will plant earlier, grow more heat-loving varieties, or change their crop entirely. And, as growing wheat and grains becomes possible higher north in Canada and Russia, even more opportunities will open up.
The largest study, conducted by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, includes temperature impacts, CO2 fertilization, and adaptation, and projects a 40.7% increase in grain production by 2050. Without global warming, production might have been half a percentage point higher. With global warming, prices will most likely be slightly lower. Our linguine supplies are safe.

Of course, this does not mean that global warming has no impact on crops. Production will move to new varieties and away from the tropics, implying even higher yields for developed countries, but slower growth in yields for developing countries. For wheat, it is even likely that parts of Africa simply will be unable to sustain production.

But cutting back on CO2 is a particularly ineffective way to help the world’s poor and hungry. Even if we managed – at very high cost – a significant reduction, we would achieve only a slightly slower rise in global temperatures. Meanwhile, by embracing biofuels, for example, we are essentially burning food in our cars, which drives up food prices and exacerbates hunger.

We could do much more good if we focused on allowing poor countries to use the benefits of extra CO2 fertilization while adapting to the problems caused by higher temperatures. That means greater investment in crop research to produce more robust and higher-yielding varieties, as well as making more irrigation, pesticides, and fertilizer available.

Furthermore, even the poorest parts of the developing world will be much richer by mid-century; most people will live in cities and earn their incomes outside agriculture. As in today’s developed countries, their consumption of wheat will not depend on whether it is produced in their own country, but on global food prices and local income.

This underscores the importance of striving for free trade, thereby enabling cheaper agricultural production while increasing wages in non-agricultural sectors. Global-warming scare stories merely shift our focus to the least effective ways to help.

Bjørn Lomborg, an adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School, founded and directs the Copenhagen Consensus Center, which seeks to study environmental problems and solutions using the best available analytical methods. He is the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It, the basis of an eponymous documentary film.

Bjørn Lomborg: Scary Pictures

PRAGUE – Campaigners on important but complex issues, annoyed by the length of time required for public deliberations, often react by exaggerating their claims, hoping to force a single solution to the forefront of public debate. But, however well intentioned, scaring the public into a predetermined solution often backfires: when people eventually realize that they have been misled, they lose confidence and interest.

Last month, there were two examples of this in a single week. On September 19, the French researcher Gilles-Eric Séralini attempted to fuel public opposition to genetically modified foods by showing the public how GM corn, with and without the pesticide Roundup, caused huge tumors and early death in 200 rats that had consumed it over two years.

Supplying an abundance of pictures of rats with tumors the size of ping-pong balls, Séralini certainly captured the public’s attention. France’s health, ecology, and agriculture ministers promised a prompt investigation and threatened to ban imports of Monsanto’s GM corn to the European Union. Russia actually did block imports of Monsanto corn.

But Séralini’s research posed many problematic issues. For starters, the Sprague-Dawley strain of rats that he used is naturally prone to tumors. Studies of Sprague-Dawley rats show that 88-96% of those that serve as experimental controls develop tumors before they reach two years of age. But the public saw only pictures of tumorous rats that had consumed GM corn and Roundup. If the public had seen the similarly grotesque tumors that grow on untreated rats, officials most likely would not have acted so hastily.

Séralini used only 20 rats as a control group to be fed ordinary corn with no Roundup. Of these, five died within two years, which is unusual, because studies of thousands of untreated Sprague-Dawley rats show that about half should have died in that period. Using his low death rate as a base, Séralini claimed – with no statistical analysis – that the higher death rate (just below 40%) for the remaining 180 rats fed with GM corn and Roundup was suspicious.

Moreover, Séralini’s results contradict the latest meta-study of 24 long-term studies (up to two years and five generations), which found that the data do “not suggest any health hazards” and display “no statistically significant differences” between GM and conventional food.

Oddly, Séralini permitted access to his paper to only a select group of reporters, and demanded that they sign a confidentiality agreement preventing them from interviewing other experts about the research before publication. But, while the first round of articles read like press releases, the scientific community has since spoken out forcefully. The European Food Safety Authority, for example, has now concluded that the “design, reporting, and analysis of the study, as outlined in the paper, are inadequate.”

The study was partly funded by CRIIGEN, a group that campaigns against biotechnology. CRIIGEN’s scientific board is headed by none other than Séralini, who has also just released a book (in French) and a documentary film decrying GM food.

This debacle matters because many GM crops provide tangible benefits for people and the environment. They enable farmers to produce higher yields with fewer inputs (such as pesticides), so that more food can be produced from existing farmland. That, in turn, implies less human encroachment into natural ecosystems, enabling greater biodiversity. But, of course, Séralini’s pictures of cancer-addled rats munching GM corn have instead been burned into the public imagination.

The Séralini fiasco was only a week old when, on September 26, the Climate Vulnerability Forum, a group of countries led by Bangladesh, launched the second edition of its Global Vulnerability Monitor. Headlines about the launch were truly alarming: Over the next 18 years, global warming would kill 100 million people and cost the economy upwards of $6.7 trillion annually.

These public messages were highly misleading – and clearly intended to shock and disturb. The vast majority of deaths discussed in the report did not actually result from global warming. Outdoor air pollution – caused by fossil-fuel combustion, not by global warming – contributed to 30% of all deaths cited in the study. And 60% of the total deaths reflect the burning of biomass (such as animal dung and crop residues) for cooking and heating, which has no relation to either fossil fuels or global warming.

In total, the study exaggerated more than 12-fold the number of deaths that could possibly be attributed to climate change, and it more than quadrupled the potential economic costs, simply to grab attention. But it will be used as a cudgel by those who claim that electric cars or solar panels – technologies that will make only a marginal contribution, given their huge incremental costs – are the solution to climate change.

The technologies that can really make a difference quickly and at lower cost are scrubbers that clean smokestack emissions, catalytic converters that reduce tailpipe emissions, and many others. By focusing purely on cutting CO2, we neglect to help many more people, much faster, and less expensively.

Likewise, overcoming the burden of indoor air pollution will happen only when people can use kerosene, propane, and grid-based electricity. If the Global Vulnerability Monitor’s recommendation to cut back on fossil fuels were taken seriously, the result would be slower economic growth and continued reliance on dung, cardboard, and other low-grade fuels, thereby prolonging the suffering that results from indoor air pollution.

When confronted with their exaggerations, the authors claimed that “if you reduce hazardous air pollution, it is difficult to not also reduce warming emissions.” But, for both indoor and outdoor air pollution, the opposite is more likely true: lower carbon emissions would mean more air pollution deaths.

When scare tactics replace scientific debate, whether about GM crops or climate change, nothing good can come of it. We all deserve better.

Bjørn Lomborg, an adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School, founded and directs the Copenhagen Consensus Center, which seeks to study environmental problems and solutions using the best available analytical methods. He is the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It, the basis of an eponymous documentary film.

Bjørn Lomborg: Like Water for Climate

MALMÖ – “Everyone knows” that you should drink eight glasses of water a day. After all, this is the advice of a multitude of health writers, not to mention authorities like Britain’s National Health Service. Healthy living now means carrying water bottles with us, sipping at all times, trying to drink our daily quota to ensure that we stay hydrated and healthy.

Indeed, often we drink without being thirsty, but that is how it should be: as the beverage maker Gatorade reminds us, “your brain may know a lot, but it doesn’t know when your body is thirsty.” Sure, drinking this much does not feel comfortable, but Powerade offers this sage counsel: “you may be able to train your gut to tolerate more fluid if you build your fluid intake gradually.”

Now the British Medical Journalreports that these claims are “not only nonsense, but thoroughly debunked nonsense.” This has been common knowledge in the medical profession at least since 2002, when Heinz Valtin, a professor of physiology and neurobiology at Dartmouth Medical School, published the first critical review of the evidence for drinking lots of water. He concluded that “not only is there no scientific evidence that we need to drink that much, but the recommendation could be harmful, both in precipitating potentially dangerous hyponatremia and exposure to pollutants and also in making many people feel guilty for not drinking enough.”

So why do we keep hearing (and believing) that more water is better? Well, obviously Gatorade and Powerade would like us to drink more of their products, and getting us to gulp more than we would naturally like seems like a brilliant marketing move. Likewise, the latest Hydration for Health science gathering, which promotes drinking more water, has been sponsored by Danone, which sells bottled water under brand names like Volvic and Evian.

The drink-more-water story is curiously similar to how “everyone knows” that global warming only makes climate more extreme. A hot, dry summer (in some places) has triggered another barrage of such claims. And, while many interests are at work, one of the players that benefits the most from this story are the media: the notion of “extreme” climate simply makes for more compelling news.

Consider Paul Krugman, writing breathlessly in The New York Times about the “rising incidence of extreme events” and how “large-scale damage from climate change is … happening now.” He claims that global warming caused the current drought in America’s Midwest, and that supposedly record-high corn prices could cause a global food crisis.
But the United Nations climate panel’s latest assessment tells us precisely the opposite: for “North America, there is medium confidencethat there has been an overall slight tendency toward less dryness (wetting trend with more soil moisture and runoff).” Moreover, there is no way that Krugman could have identified this drought as being caused by global warming without a time machine: climate models estimate that such detection will be possible by 2048, at the earliest.

And, fortunately, this year’s drought appears unlikely to cause a food crisis. According to TheEconomist, “price increases in corn and soybeans are not thought likely to trigger a food crisis, as they did in 2007-08, as global rice and wheat supplies remain plentiful.” Moreover, Krugman overlooks inflation: prices have increased six-fold since 1969, so, while corn futures did set a record of about $8 per bushel in late July, the inflation-adjusted price of corn was higher throughout most of the 1970’s, reaching a whopping $16 in 1974.

Finally, Krugman conveniently forgets that concerns about global warming are the main reason that corn prices have skyrocketed since 2005. Nowadays 40% of corn grown in the United States is used to produce ethanol, which does absolutely nothing for the climate, but certainly distorts the price of corn – at the expense of many of the world’s poorest people.

Bill McKibben similarly frets in The Guardian and The Daily Beast about the Midwest drought and corn prices. Moreover, he confidently tells us that raging wildfires from New Mexico and Colorado to Siberia are “exactly” what the early stages of global warming look like.
In fact, the latest overview of global wildfire incidence suggests that, because humans have suppressed fire and decreased vegetation density, fire intensity has declined over the past 70 years, and is now close to its preindustrial level.

When well-meaning campaigners want us to pay attention to global warming, they often end up pitching beyond the facts. And, while this may seem justified by a noble goal, such “policy by panic” tactics rarely work, and often backfire.

Remember how, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Al Gore (and many others) claimed that we were in store for ever more devastating hurricanes? Since then, hurricane incidence has dropped off the charts; indeed, by one measure, global accumulated cyclone energy has decreased to its lowest levels since the late 1970’s. Exaggerated claims merely fuel public distrust and disengagement.

That is unfortunate, because global warming is a real problem, and we do need to address it. Warming will increase some extremes (it is likely that both droughts and fires will become worse toward the end of the century). But warming will also decrease other extremes, for example, leading to fewer deaths from cold and less water scarcity.

Similarly, there are real health problems – and many of them. But focusing on the wrong ones – like drinking a lot of water – diverts our attention from more important issues. Telling tall tales may benefit those with a stake in the telling, but it leaves us all worse off.

Bjørn Lomborg is an adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School, where he founded and directs its Copenhagen Consensus Center, which seeks to study environmental problems and solutions using the best available analytical methods. He is the author of the bestselling book The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It, the basis of an eponymous documentary film.

Bjørn Lomborg: The Smartest Ways to Save the World

COPENHAGEN – If you had $75 billion to spend over the next four years and your goal was to advance human welfare, especially in the developing world, how could you get the most value for your money?

That is the question that I posed to a panel of five top economists, including four Nobel laureates, in the Copenhagen Consensus 2012 project. The panel members were chosen for their expertise in prioritization and their ability to use economic principles to compare policy choices.

Over the past year, more than 50 economists prepared research on nearly 40 investment proposals in areas ranging from armed conflicts and natural disasters to hunger, education, and global warming. The teams that drafted each paper identified the costs and benefits of the smartest ways to spend money within their area. In early May, many of them traveled to Denmark to convince the expert panel of the power of their investment proposals.

The panel’s findings reveal that, if spent smartly, $75 billion – just a 15% increase in current aid spending – could go a long way to solving many of the world’s challenges.

The single most important investment, according to the panel, would step up the fight against malnutrition. New research for the project by John Hoddinott of the International Food Policy Research Institute and Peter Orazem of Iowa State University focuses on an investment of $3 billion annually. This would purchase a bundle of interventions, including micronutrient provision, complementary foods, treatment for worms and diarrheal diseases, and behavior-change programs, all of which could reduce chronic under-nutrition by 36% in developing countries.

In total, such an investment would help more than 100 million children to start their lives without stunted growth or malnourishment. And comprehensive research now shows that such interventions would stay with them for life: their bodies and muscles would grow faster, their cognitive abilities would improve, and they would pay more attention in school (and stay there longer). Studies show that, decades down the line, these children would be more productive, make more money, have fewer kids, and begin a virtuous circle of dramatic development.

Such opportunities come sharply into focus when you ask some of the world’s best minds to find the biggest bang for the buck. Micronutrient provision is rarely celebrated, but it makes a world of difference.

Likewise, just $300 million would prevent 300,000 child deaths if it were used to strengthen the Global Fund’s Affordable Medicines Facility-malaria financing mechanism, which makes combination therapies cheaper for poor countries. Put in economic terms, the benefits are 35 times higher than the costs – even without taking into account that it safeguards our most effective malaria drug from future drug resistance. Later this year, donors will decide whether to renew this facility. The panel’s findings should help to persuade them to do so.

For a similar amount, 300 million children could be dewormed in schools. By not sharing their food with intestinal parasites, they, too, would become more alert, stay longer in school, and grow up to be more productive adults – another cause that needs much more public attention.
Expanding tuberculosis treatment and childhood immunization coverage are two other health investments that the expert panel endorses. Likewise, a $100 million annual increase in spending to develop a vaccine against HIV/AIDS would generate substantial benefits in the future.
As people in the developing world live longer, they are increasingly experiencing chronic disease; indeed, half of all deaths this year will be from chronic diseases in Third World countries. Here, the panel finds that spending just $122 million could achieve complete Hepatitis B vaccine coverage and avert about 150,000 annual deaths from the disease. Getting low-cost drugs for acute heart attacks to developing countries would cost just $200 million, and prevent 300,000 deaths.

The expert panel’s findings point to a compelling need to invest roughly $2 billion annually in research and development to increase agricultural output. Not only would this reduce hunger by increasing food production and lowering food prices; it would also protect biodiversity, because higher crop productivity would mean less deforestation. That, in turn, would help in the fight against climate change, because forests store carbon.

When it comes to climate change, the experts recommend spending a small amount – roughly $1 billion – to investigate the feasibility of cooling the planet through geo-engineering options. This would allow us to understand better the technology’s risks, costs, and benefits. Moreover, the research could potentially give us low-cost, effective insurance against global warming.

Another priority for investment is the establishment of effective early-warning systems for natural disasters in developing countries. For less than $1 billion a year, this would alleviate both direct and long-term economic damage, possibly securing some $35 billion in benefits.

The $75 billion budget chosen for the Copenhagen Consensus project is large enough to make a real difference, but small enough that we must choose – as in the real world – the projects that can achieve the most good. The expert panel’s list shows us that there are many smart solutions waiting to be implemented.

Bjørn Lomborg is an adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School, where he founded and directs its Copenhagen Consensus Center, which seeks to study environmental problems and solutions using the best available analytical methods. He is the author of the bestselling book The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It, the basis of an eponymous documentary film.

Bjørn Lomborg: The Problem of Priorities

COPENHAGEN – This decade has seen remarkable progress against humanity’s greatest challenges. Consider the declaration of victory over polio in India, which seemed impossible ten years ago. January marked one year since the country’s last reported case. Or look at the strides made against malaria: over the past decade, the number of cases has been reduced by 17%, and the number of deaths has dropped by 26%.

Despite global population growth and economic crisis, absolute poverty – the proportion of people living on less than $1.25 a day – is falling in every region of the world. In fact, the United Nations Millennium Development Goal of cutting extreme poverty in half has been achieved five years ahead of time.

Just a few years ago, the use of male circumcision as a tool in the fight against HIV/AIDS was largely unknown. Today, UNAIDS and the World Health Organization recommend it as a means to combat HIV/AIDS, and more than ten African countries are implementing strategies to increase its availability. Similarly, the concept of using geo-engineering to respond to climate change has moved from science fiction to an area of serious research.

This decade has also witnessed a 60% increase in global development aid. Bill Gates’s Giving Pledge challenge has graduated from concept to campaign, with at least $125 billion promised to good causes.

But, while the last decade has given much reason for cheer, there are areas in which we cannot claim such success. Climate change has emerged as one of the most talked-about problems, yet global negotiations have fallen apart, and we are barely any closer to cutting carbon emissions than we were ten years ago.

Similarly, violent conflicts continue to take a toll that is far too high. And, while the world met the Millennium Development Goal for providing clean drinking water five years early, the provision of sanitation has fallen behind: an astonishing one-third of the world’s population, 2.5 billion people, lack access to basic sanitation, and more than one billion people defecate in the open.

Other problems have emerged and grown over the decade. If current patterns continue, tobacco use may account for some 10 million deaths per year by 2030, with most occurring in low- and middle-income countries: we might see roughly one billion tobacco-related deaths in this century, compared to 100 million in the twentieth century. Cardiovascular diseases account for 13 million deaths in low- and middle-income countries each year, more than a quarter of the entire death toll, and risk factors are growing.

The state of challenges facing humanity changes rapidly. So does our knowledge of how best to respond. Policymakers and philanthropists need access to regularly updated information on how to use limited funds effectively.

The Copenhagen Consensus project, which I direct, provides a link between academic research and concrete economic analysis that can be used by decision-makers in the real world. Every four years, researchers and Nobel laureates work to identify the smartest responses to the biggest problems facing humanity.

In 2004, the Copenhagen Consensus highlighted the need to prioritize measures to control and treat HIV/AIDS. More money and attention was soon devoted to HIV prevention and treatment. In 2008, the Copenhagen Consensus focused the attention of policymakers and philanthropists on investments in micronutrient provision. Public acceptance of this idea led to an increase in efforts to reduce “hidden hunger” – that is, people suffering from not getting the nutrients that they need.

This May, more than 30 Nobel laureates and researchers will work together once again to identify the smartest ways to respond to global challenges, based on the latest information about the toughest problems facing our world.

Since 2008, the global economic crisis has made it even more necessary to ensure that development and aid spending is used wisely, where it can make the biggest difference. The Copenhagen Consensus project carries out the difficult task of comparing one set of initiatives with another by using fundamental economic tools and principles. 

First, teams of world-renowned expert economists write research papers on the costs and benefits of a range of investments that address specific challenges. Debate and discussion is encouraged by ensuring that three papers are written for each topic, so that a range of expert opinions is available.

This provides a framework with which we can see the full price tag, incorporating all of the costs, benefits, and spin-offs to society from using a limited amount of money in a particular way.

All of this research constitutes a valuable contribution to international development and aid policy. But the project goes a step further. A panel of the world’s top economists – including four Nobel laureates – test and debate the experts’ recommendations, and identify the most attractive possibilities. Alongside the research papers, the Nobel laureates’ prioritized list provides an important input for policymakers and philanthropists.

While the past decade has witnessed much progress and reason for hope, there are still many important problems to tackle: malnutrition, sanitation, education, civil conflicts, climate change, and natural disasters, to name some of the most prominent.

But are the most prominent problems necessarily those that we should address immediately? The research and the prioritized list make us consider the reasons for our current priorities, and challenge us to spend limited resources to do the most good first. And what are the best things to do first? We find out in May.

Bjørn Lomborg is an adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School, where he founded and directs its Copenhagen Consensus Center, which seeks to study environmental problems and solutions using the best available analytical methods. He is the author of the bestselling book The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It, the basis of an eponymous documentary film.

Bjørn Lomborg: Germany’s Sunshine Daydream

COPENHAGEN – One of the world’s biggest green-energy public-policy experiments is coming to a bitter end in Germany, with important lessons for policymakers elsewhere.

Germany once prided itself on being the “photovoltaic world champion”, doling out generous subsidies – totaling more than $130 billion, according to research from Germany’s Ruhr University – to citizens to invest in solar energy. But now the German government is vowing to cut the subsidies sooner than planned, and to phase out support over the next five years. What went wrong?

There is a fundamental problem with subsidizing inefficient green technology: it is affordable only if it is done in tiny, tokenistic amounts. Using the government’s generous subsidies, Germans installed 7.5 gigawatts of photovoltaic (PV) capacity last year, more than double what the government had deemed “acceptable.” It is estimated that this increase alone will lead to a $260 hike in the average consumer’s annual power bill.

According to Der Spiegel, even members of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s staff are now describing the policy as a massive money pit. Philipp Rösler, Germany’s minister of economics and technology, has called the spiraling solar subsidies a “threat to the economy.”

Germany’s enthusiasm for solar power is understandable. We could satisfy all of the world’s energy needs for an entire year if we could capture just one hour of the sun’s energy. Even with the inefficiency of current PV technology, we could meet the entire globe’s energy demand with solar panels by covering 250,000 square kilometers (155,342 square miles), about 2.6% of the Sahara Desert.

Unfortunately, Germany – like most of the world – is not as sunny as the Sahara. And, while sunlight is free, panels and installation are not. Solar power is at least four times more costly than energy produced by fossil fuels. It also has the distinct disadvantage of not working at night, when much electricity is consumed.

In the words of the German Association of Physicists, “solar energy cannot replace any additional power plants.” On short, overcast winter days, Germany’s 1.1 million solar-power systems can generate no electricity at all. The country is then forced to import considerable amounts of electricity from nuclear power plants in France and the Czech Republic. When the sun failed to shine last winter, one emergency back-up plan powered up an Austrian oil-fired plant to fill the supply gap.

Indeed, despite the massive investment, solar power accounts for only about 0.3% of Germany’s total energy. This is one of the key reasons why Germans now pay the second-highest price for electricity in the developed world (exceeded only by Denmark, which aims to be the “world wind-energy champion”). Germans pay three times more than their American counterparts.

Moreover, this sizeable investment does remarkably little to counter global warming. Even with unrealistically generous assumptions, the unimpressive net effect is that solar power reduces Germany’s CO2 emissions by roughly eight million metric tons – or about 1% – for the next 20 years. When the effects are calculated in a standard climate model, the result is a reduction in average temperature of 0.00005oC (one twenty-thousandth of a degree Celsius, or one ten-thousandth of a degree Fahrenheit). To put it another way: by the end of the century, Germany’s $130 billion solar panel subsidies will have postponed temperature increases by 23 hours.

Using solar, Germany is paying about $1,000 per ton of CO2 reduced. The current CO2 price in Europe is $8. Germany could have cut 131 times as much CO2 for the same price. Instead, the Germans are wasting more than 99 cents of every euro that they plow into solar panels.

It gets worse: because Germany is part of the European Union Emissions Trading System, the actual effect of extra solar panels in Germany leads to no CO2 reductions, because total emissions are already capped. Instead, the Germans simply allow other parts of the EU to emit more CO2. Germany’s solar panels have only made it cheaper for Portugal or Greece to use coal.

Defenders of Germany’s solar subsidies also claim that they have helped to create “green jobs”. But each job created by green-energy policies costs an average of $175,000 – considerably more than job creation elsewhere in the economy, such as infrastructure or health care. And many “green jobs” are being exported to China, meaning that Europeans subsidize Chinese jobs, with no CO2 reductions.

Germany’s experiment with subsidizing inefficient solar technology has failed. What governments should do instead is to focus first on increasing research and development to make green-energy technology cheaper and more competitive. Production should be ramped up later.

In the meantime, Germans have paid about $130 billion for a climate-change policy that has no impact on global warming. They have subsidized Chinese jobs and other European countries’ reliance on dirty energy sources. And they have needlessly burdened their economy. As even many German officials would probably attest, governments elsewhere cannot afford to repeat the same mistake.

Bjørn Lomborg is the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It, head of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, and adjunct professor at Copenhagen Business School.

Bjørn Lomborg:The Emperor’s New Climate-Change Agreement

COPENHAGEN – Dressing up failure as victory has been integral to climate-change negotiations since they started 20 years ago. The latest round of talks in Durban, South Africa, in December was no exception.

Climate negotiations have been in virtual limbo ever since the catastrophic and humiliating Copenhagen summit in 2009, where vertiginous expectations collided with hard political reality. So as negotiators – and a handful of government ministers – arrived in Durban, expectations could not have been lower.

Yet, by the end of the talks, the European Union’s climate commissioner, Connie Hedegaard, was being applauded in the media for achieving a “breakthrough” that had “salvaged Durban,” and, most significantly, for achieving the holy grail of climate negotiations, a “legally binding treaty.” According to British climate minister Chris Huhne, the results showed that the United Nations climate-change negotiation system “really works and can produce results.”

Sure, the agreement would come into effect only in 2020 – which sounds oddly complacent when environmentalists and political leaders warned ahead of the Copenhagen conference that we had just six months or 50 days to solve the climate problem. But, as the British newspaper The Guardian assured readers, this was a breakthrough, because developing countries, including India and China, were, for the first time, “agreeing to be legally bound to curb their greenhouse gases.” And, just as importantly, the US was making the same promise.

Let’s take a look at the actual agreement reached in Durban that generated all that congratulatory back-slapping. It won’t take long: the document runs to two pages, contains no commitments to cut emissions, and outlines no policies to implement the undefined cuts. There is simply a promise “to launch a process to develop a protocol, another legal instrument, or an agreed outcome with legal force.”

An agreement to launch a legal process. That is what everyone got so worked up about? And, again, the negotiators merely promised to set themselves a deadline of 2015 to finish setting up this legal process, which would enter into force five years hence.

Just a few days later, the Indian environment minister, Shrimati Jayanthi Natarajan, stressed that there was no legally binding treaty: “India cannot agree to a legally binding agreement for emissions reduction at this stage of our development.…I must clarify that [Durban] does not imply that India has to take binding commitments to reduce its emissions in absolute terms in 2020.”

India was not alone. The day after the Durban conference, Canada officially withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol, which Russia and Japan have already declined to extend, leaving only the EU’s member states and a few other countries committed to further reductions.

Hollow victories have been central to climate negotiations since they began. The Durban agreement uncannily echoes the agreement reached in Bali in 2007 “to launch a comprehensive process to enable the full, effective, and sustained implementation of the [UN Climate] Convention through long-term cooperative action.” According to that deal – which was, of course, much celebrated at the time – a legal treaty was supposed to be ready for the 2009 Copenhagen meeting.

In Kyoto in 1997, the treaty was acclaimed as “a milestone in the history of climate protection,” and President Bill Clinton declared that “the United States has reached an historic agreement with other nations of the world to take unprecedented action to address global warming.”
Of course, the treaty had already been rejected in the US Senate by a 95-0 vote, and thus was dead on arrival. This, and lax interpretations of emissions in the years following Kyoto, meant that more emissions occurred under the protocol than had been expected to occur in its absence according to research undertaken by the economists Christoph Böhringer and Carsten Vogt.

Even at the start of global climate-change negotiations in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, the aim of putting the planet “on a course to address the critical issue of global warming” soon went awry. Rich countries fell 12% short of their promise to cut emissions to 1990 levels by 2000.
For 20 years, climate negotiators have repeatedly celebrated deals that haven’t panned out. Worse, for all practical purposes, the promises that have been made have had no impact on global CO2 emissions. They have only provided false hope that we have addressed climate change and allowed us to push it to the back burner for another few years. So, before we get too excited celebrating the “breakthrough” of Durban, we would do well to reflect on a two-decade history of flogging a dead horse.

We will never reduce emissions significantly until we manage to make green energy cheaper than fossil fuels. We must focus sharply on research and development to drive down alternative energy prices over coming decades.

The first step toward doing that is to end our collective suspension of disbelief when it comes to climate-change negotiations. We need to see through the hype and self-serving political spin. We owe it to the future to do better.

Bjørn Lomborg is the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It, head of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, and adjunct professor at Copenhagen Business School.