Lomborg-errors

"Smart Solutions to Climate Change"
  
    Home                                                                                                          Copenhagen Consensus on Climate                        


"Smart Solutions to Climate Change. Comparing costs and benefits", edited by Bjørn Lomborg.
Cambridge University Press, 413 pp.

The book was published in November 2010. It presents the results of the conference "Copenhagen Consensus on Climate", see this page on Lomborg-errors.


The book is presented here by the publisher, including a copy of the Introduction Chapter by Lomborg.

A survey of the chapters may be found here.

A preliminary criticial comment by Howard Friel about the book may be found in this link.

Review of the book in Journal of Environmental Investing



Lomborg-errors´ evaluation of the book

The theme of carbon taxation in the book

Criticism of the economic models used in the book

Some remarkable quotes from the book



Short description of the contents of the book:

The book has eight main chapters on possible solutions to climate change; they are:
Climate engineering
Reduction of carbon dioxide emissions by taxation
Sequestration of carbon by protecting and expanding forests
Cutting emissions of black carbon (soot)
Cutting methane emissions
Adaptation as a supplement or a substitute to mitigation
Boosting innovation of energy technology
Technology transfer between developed and less developed countries

For each main chapter, there are one or two so-called perspective papers which present an alternative view on the subject.

At the end of the book, there are just 13 pages presenting the ranking of the solutions according to five prominent economists: Nancy L. Stokey, Vernon L. Smith, Thomas C. Schelling, Finn E. Kydland and Jagdish N. Bhagwati. Each of these five persons has made a personal ranking of the presented solutions from the best to the poorest. After that, an overall ranking has been produced by taking the median of the individual rankings. The result is that a type of climate engineering (marine cloud whitening) gets top priority, whereas various types of carbon dioxide tax are ranked the lowest and are designated as very poor solutions.

In his one and a half page concluding remark, Bjørn Lomborg concludes that "the expert panel has found that drastic carbon cuts would be the poorest way to respond to global warming", whereas some proposed climate enegineering technologies could be cheap, fast and effective.