What is wrong about the "Copenhagen Consensus" conferences? |
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About Copenhagen Consensus in The
Lomborg Story |
Lomborg arranged the first
"Copenhagen Consensus" conference in 2004 and has planned to arrange a
similar conference every fourth year. The second was held in 2008 and
the third in 2012. In
addition, some other local conferences have been held along the same
lines.
Comments to the conferences are given here:
Text on Copenhagen Consensus 2004
Text on Copenhagen Consensus
2008
Text on Copenhagen Consensus 2012 .
The conferences are set up in such a way that
short-term problems will inevitably get a higher priority than
long-term problems. As the climate issue is a long-term problem, it
will always get a low rank. And indeed, the 2004 conference resulted in
climate problems being given the lowest of all
ranks.
How this comes about, is explained in more detail in
Lomborg-errrors´ pages on the 2004 conference, and especially in
the pages about discounting and discount rates.
I have also written a page on the concepts
"cost-efficiency" and "cost-benefit".
Text on Copenhagen Consensus 2004
Text
on discounting
Debate between Fog and Lomborg on cheating
with discount rates
Cost-effectiveness versus
cost-benefit
Although the basic criticism of the whole set-up of
the conferences is found in the text on the 2004 conference, there are
some additional critical comments on the 2008
conference and the 2012 conference. For instance, in the 2012
conference, it is obvious that the ranking of the projects is
subjective and does not clearly follow the ranking of the
benefit-cost-ratios.
According to Lomborg, Copenhagen Consensus 2004 has
stimulated increased funding for the efforts against malaria and
HIV/AIDS. Has this funding been worthwhile? Did the effort actually pay
off as well as postulated in Copenhagen Consensus 2004? Can the effort
stand up to a cost/benefit analysis? This is discussed here:
Analysis
of the actual efforts and
their outcome