Monday, April 27, 2009
Sanyo Solar Ark
When it comes to stopping global warming, world leaders are going about it the wrong way, says Bjorn Lomborg, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center at the Copenhagen Business School. Large multilateral treaties intended to cut emissions, such as those forged at Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and Kyoto in 1997 did nothing to stop greenhouse gases from spilling into the atmosphere. Instead of going down this same path again, which leaders are planning to do in Copenhagen this December, a smarter option would be to make low-carbon alternatives like solar and wind energy competitive with old carbon sources, such as coal.
“This requires much more spending on research and development of low-carbon energy technology,” writes Lomborg. “We might have assumed that investment in this research would have increased when the Kyoto Protocol made fossil fuel use more expensive, but it has not.”
Investing in alternative energy sources will prove to be more cost-effective, he adds. Every dollar spent on these low-carbon energy supplies will yield $16 worth of good, while the Kyoto way of doing things will only produce 30 cents worth of good. That’s why attendees at the Copenhagen summit should agree that every country spend one-twentieth of a percent of its gross domestic product on low-carbon energy research and development. This level of international commitment would mean a $30 billion a year investment into low carbon R&D —15 times more than is currently being spent. That’s a lot sounder than a $180 billion worth of lost growth that would result from the Kyoto restrictions, Lomborg insists.
-Noel Brinkerhoff
Don’t Waste Time Cutting Emissions (by Bjorn Lomborg, New York Times)
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