The Black Sheep

Bjorn Lomborg is a Danish political scientist and author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, a controversial book about the costs and benefits of reducing carbon emissions and mitigating climate change. He spoke to NEWSWEEK about the Stern Review, Al Gore and his critics.

NEWSWEEK: The Stern Review, a 2006 report on the economics of climate change, concluded that averting the worst impacts of climate change will cost 1 percent of global GDP annually, and that failure to address the problem could cost a projected 20 percent of global GDP.
LOMBORG: It understates the costs of dealing with climate change. It says it's 1 percent. Even the U.N. estimates that it's somewhere between 3 and 5 percent, depending on the time frame. And it dramatically exaggerates the cost of not doing something. Most models show that the costs by the end of the century from global warming say 3 percent of GDP. Basically it's a non-peer reviewed study that was commissioned by the UK government to come out and support the UK government's policy. It tells us a very different story from all of the peer reviewed, published studies that it bases itself on.

The Stern Review doesn't necessarily say, don't invest in HIV and malaria vaccines, which you say we should devote our resources to.  Aren't you like a doctor saying diet or exercise, instead of diet and exercise?
No. The Stern Report is more like a doctor standing in the midst of a war zone and saying, "Hey, lets treat everyone." That doesn't work. We do triage, and we do that in every other area. So it's always struck me as slightly curious that people say, "Oh, we should do everything." Well, of course we should do everything. But as long as we haven't done that very well over the last 50 years, shouldn't we do things where we do an amazing amount of good first?

Do you accept the Stern Review's characterization of climate change as a market failure?
Oh, absolutely. One, it's definitely a problem. It's man-made. Climate change is  caused by us burning fossil fuels. That's also why it's a market failure, because we need to price CO2. But, the way that it's being projected as the biggest, most dramatic issue of the 21st century is simply blatantly wrong.

The Stern Review concludes that the poorest countries will be affected most by climate change.
The fact that developing countries are going to be harder hit makes a lot of people say, "And that means we should deal with climate change." But if you have more global warming, you're going to be harder hit, for instance, by malaria and many other problems. Likewise, if you have more malaria, you're going to be much more vulnerable to global warming. I'm asking a very simple question: "If there are other ways that we could help those developing countries much more, wouldn't that be a better way?" Isn't better to help people with malaria right now than to focus, for instance, on climate policies like the Kyoto Protocol, that will do virtually nothing 100 years from now, and of course nothing today?

By setting targets for global carbon emissions reductions, doesn't the Kyoto protocol provide an incentive for R&D?
Basically, trying to live up to the Kyoto Protocol means that you buy a lot of windmills. Now, obviously, you would imagine that a very little bit of that money spent would go to produce more efficient windmills. If you spend 100 percent on windmills, 1 percent will go to R&D. I'm simply saying, "Well, if it's R&D that we need in the long run, why don't we spend 10 percent on R&D, and actually buy that outright, and save the 90 percent for other things that we would presumably like to do, like dealing with some of the world's other problems, or simply dealing with some of the problems that the first world cares about, like getting better hospitals?"