Economist Bjorn Lomborg: Global warming is not a priority

A challenging speech at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dtbn9zBfJSs&mode=related&search=

Top 4 priorities on the list of economics:

1. AIDS
2. Malnutrition
3. Free Trade
4. Malaria

Top ten at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_Consensus

1. Global Warming sometimes also called Climate change (William R. Cline)
2. Communicable diseases (Anne Mills)
3. Conflicts (Paul Collier)
4. Education (Lant Pritchett)
5. Financial instability (Barry Eichengreen)
6. Government and corruption (Susan Rose-Ackerman)
7. Malnutrition and hunger (Jere Behrman)
8. Population: migration (Phillip L. Martin)
9. Sanitation and water (Frank Rijsberman)
10. Subsidies and trade barriers (Kym Anderson)

An enthusiastic economics tells us how we can help the world on the bottom dollar.

In contrast he says global warming costs alot with minimum returns (delaying global warming 6 years with our best effort OR all of the above)

He asked the audience to make their priorities and then asked them if they found the "correct" answers above.

I appreciate his willingness to take on the reality of costs of making a difference and the choices that can make the biggest difference. Interestingly MY top priority isn't on the list at all apparently - energy sustainability. Perhaps because the talk was 2 years ago???

I know my ALTERNATIVE approach is to GIVE UP. Like the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Quinn perspective, author of Ishmael, admitting lowering mortality without lowering fertility is madness, taking a fully inhuman perspective.

I mean looking at the list above, it first of all FAILS because it says problems are "out there" rather than with US. It seems WE ARE RESPONSIBLE to others and WE HAVE THE POWER to save. It is a lovely DREAM perspective, "What if I had power to save humanity", and I'll dream that myself often enough, but perhaps BECAUSE of my own idealism, it strikes me as childish and immature, possibly even delusional.

To me it's like children finding their inheritance buried in the backyard, and start spending it as fast as possible, and even as they do many great things, they also make great messes. Then they see their messes have caused cause great suffering, or at least in part efforts to offset suffering has created different suffering. Well, then they brainstorm a new list of things they can do to solve real problems for poor people of the world, and TOTALLY miss the fact they are living off of a one time inheritence and when it is gone, all gains will be lost, and the world will fade into a new darkness.

I guess an optimist says the world keeps getting brighter, and so we have more power to fix problems. I say (as a pessimist), we've failed to solve ANYTHING until we look in the mirror and make the hard choices that will lead to a future that we will be in charge of our own destiny, when our magic inheritence is gone.

I follow Quinn's view, at least as an alternative, outside of the view that civilization was a choice that can sustain itself. I don't know, but I at least see we are ALL at risk, that globalization has allowed a concentration of wealth and power and that DEVELOPMENT ultimately reenforces further concentrations and destroys local communities in two ways.

First it seduces us with a free lunch - if we surrender our freedom, we'll be cared for. Second it seduces us with power - if we participate, we'll become powertful.

And it's true, within its little framework of a few lifetimes, but what if we create a world where wealth and power mean reducing the potential for wealth and power in the future? Who's going to stop a free lunch and power merely because tomorrow or the next day we might have problems? Well, people who have worked HARD in their life and don't want their success or failure to be dependent upon a bunch of greedy bastards whose hard work is only to look for more trinkets to sell to the masses?!

I don't know what MY PROBLEM is. I admit I have one, a general distrust of power, of systems that I don't understand. I might distrust nature too - I mean she brings bad weather and 100,000 year glacial cycles, yuck, but at least she's got a track record.

Our new fangled power is illusionary, based on stealing energy from ancient sunlight, fossil fuels that can not sustain us, global warming or not.

Business people are not normal people. They are "hard-wired" by life experiences to see RISK as OPPORTUNITY. They look at things ordinary people wouldn't take on in a million years, and they go forward without any certainty of results, and they SELL ideas with a language that convinces others to follow, and perhaps their success is greater than a major league baseball hitter's average. I don't know, but in a statisical sense, they're RIGHT - they KICK ASS on the world of sheep (us).

Sure I'm jealous, and sure I'm seducible too in my own corrupt heart, but I'm still gonna keep looking for the door, looking for the step that might free me from this corruption.

Yes, sure let all the greedy bastards support "Free trade" as the door to prosperity. I mean I won't say ALL of their motives are self-interest. I'll give them empathy and guilt and desire to help others less fortunate. I guess I just think their message is a false hope, again a child with a credit card can do a lot of cool things for a while, but real change requires something more I'm sure.

Okay, let me be nonPC - this fucking AIDS thing. I have pity for those infected, and I know we ought to help reduce transmission. I don't have a clear religious agenda against sexual expression. I have a GREAT desire to at least defend the female half of the population, but ultimately CULTURE must change! Religious control of sex based on men controlling women is BAD, but I have to say women are going to have to defend their collective interest against culture that allows men to have dozens of sexual partners before (and after) marriage. I do blame the men largely.

The compassionate response is to treat the symptoms, but maybe like a civil war, sometimes you have to step back and let people fight it out. This means to me that cultures that don't respect women MUST decline. Sorry, just the fact. Survival of the fittest and all that. AIDS babies don't do very well.

Now I'm not taking a position on what we ought to do, just admitting treating symptoms is not enough, even if it's cheap in the short term.

So I'll surrender as usual, but just feel angry at arrogant economics, looking at the world, filtered through false security in short term success and imagining they have something to offer because they know how to do double-entry bookkeeping.

Solve the energy issue. That's all I ask.

Figure out how to grow our food without needing fossil fuels. That's all.

Figure out how to keep up our electrical grid without fossul fuels.

Figure out how to keep our homes warm (and cool) without fossil fuels.

Figure out how to live within a solar economy. What we're doing is suicide, even ignoring all the greed and hatreds.

We've scaled up our needs so that NOTHING can replace our one time inheritence.

Does anyone else have a problem with this?!

Is economic optimization of efficiency to save lives for a few years going to make any difference later?

I don't have a sound position, a defendable one, which allows me to keep my creature comforts, to keep my intellectual desires for knowledge ever expanding. I do think learning can keep increasing exponentially.

The economist is right - we must make hard choices. We must tell the truth - that we are weak little monkeys with a little too much power at the moment, and unsure what's going to happen next.

The more people who accept RISK is not good, that they'd better look at the world with less demands and more patience, that is good.

Whether or not spending $100B/year or whatever to save the third world, I don't know.

I know being scared isn't a virtue in itself, although I admit fear tempered with sound action is good.

I don't want to say I'm responsible for the destruction of the rain forests, for AIDS in Africa, for droughts in China, for hurricanes in India. My angry child says someone ought to DO something. I know it is self-centered to just worry about MY problems, but I know somehow I am part of the problem, and whatever good I can do must in part come from defending my own life.

It is too grim, to imagine all the horrors in the world, to know how to react. I'm still sure too much is caused by our system, our demands for resources.

I guess can take the republican lament "Democrats love to spend other people's money". Well economists like to spend other people's money too.

If our wealth and power was focused on creating a world where people could live contentedly without great weath and power, I'd be more content to believe I was part of a solution.

The BEST thing the world's rich can do (including me, as a sheep yes) is teach how to live without spending all the wealth within our reach.

For me reduce our energy consumption is the FUNDAMENTAL moral impossibility.

1. Americans consume more resources than the world can support for the world's population.
2. The rest of the world can NOT copy America.
3. America MUST change before we all fail.

This is the game - open and close. Sure, throw a few billion to the poor, but don't CLAIM you're doing good if you have to reduce the world's future to pay for your "generosity".