Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)

I still use your original response to Lomborg's NYT editorial (as well as the editorial as well) as the opening exercise in my environmental economics class. It introduces most of what I want to do.

Thanks,

“But spending money makes another person’s income, doesn’t it? Oh no, it’s the efficiency; it won’t be as efficent, you see... Well then, it’s how far you go along ALL the interconnections, and how much you tote up in the costs AND benefits, isn’t it? Uh...[Blank look]...”

It’s another version of the corporate/academic think-tankery which has served the Right so well, in which the natural non-predictability of Whole Systems confounds the troops and their rubes, and sends the rest of us scrambling in a dither to eggheadedly explain Everything from allocation to complexity to the philosophies of logic and science.

You find your mark, then you fund him...

Next up: Lomborg accepts employment offer from John Graham at OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (God I love that name!) and starts to expound that if everyone will just eat a little more mercury, it’ll be WAYgood for the bottom line! Yo!

"Greatly expanding development aid would do much more good for the world than spending the same amount of money fighting global warming"

that half is true.

"so let's do neither"

that half is not true.

What Giles said.
(I say this as a former DOE Global Change Fellow)

Well, there is no surprise in any of this, is there? Advertising creates consumers which create profit. Health care might create consumers which create profit, but it might not. Particularly in Africa, how much money devoted to clean water would it take to create consumers of financial instruments, Paxil, and PDAs?

Well, the half that some of us have trouble with is the clause that contains the subject "let's".

You're perfectly free to buy a (wind? nuclear powered?) electric automobile and reduce C02 emissions, if you like. I'm perfectly free to buy a diesel burning, smoke belching, soot producing engine/generator to pump water, light lamps, and run computers in remote third world villages. But why should I have the power to coerce you to pay for my notions of the better choice, to pay your fair share of the cost of the world-wide improvement I hope to make?

The thing is, if "we" agree "let's each one do as he likes" we might advance toward both good ends. If "we" agree to the proposition, "let's choose the very best thing to do, and force each other to comply with that choice" then fights immediately break out about how to choose, how to enforce, how to measure compliance ...

"Let's do neither [one]" allows us to do some of both, to avoid the fights. To prevent the wars.

That's a good thing, right?

CalDem writes, "I still use your (Brad DeLong's)original response to Lomborg's NYT editorial (as well as the editorial) as the opening exercise in my environmental economics class."

Why in the world would you use Brad DeLong's response to Bjorn Lomborg's editorial? Essentially, Dr. DeLong's response indicated that he either didn't read or didn't understand Bjorn Lomborg's editorial.

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000778.html

Brad DeLong wrote: "It's not my field of expertise, but as a card-carrying economist I can't help but think that Lomborg is probably right when he condemns Kyoto as a worthless waste of the world's wealth--as something that will be ineffective at fighting global warming and so expensive as to foreclose options to do other things that would be more useful. Lomborg's flaw, however, is that he doesn't spell out what the "other things" we should be doing are. And that's what he needs to do if he wants to advance the ball."

But in his editorial Bjorn Lomborg made it ***very*** clear where the money should be spent:

"For the cost of Kyoto for just one year we could solve the world's biggest problem: we could provide every person in the world with clean water. This alone would save two million lives each year and prevent 500 million from severe disease. In fact, for the same amount Kyoto would have cost just the United States every year, the United Nations estimates that we could provide every person in the world with access to basic health, education, family planning and water and sanitation services."

Haven't your students pointed out to you the fact that Brad DeLong's response essentially ignored the fundamental point of Lomborg's editorial?

It seems to me that understanding the fundamental point of Lomborg's editorial would be pretty important to an Environmental Economics class.

New to DeLong's views on the environment, what I'm taking away from this exchange is that they are entirely religious, devoid of any economic or empirical basis.
But they do conform to standard liberal dogma.

"New to DeLong's views on the environment, what I'm taking away from this exchange is that they are entirely religious, devoid of any economic or empirical basis. But they do conform to standard liberal dogma."

I don't agree. I don't see that "standard liberal dogma" would ever make a statement like, "It's not my field of expertise, but as a card-carrying economist I can't help but think that Lomborg is probably right when he condemns Kyoto as a worthless waste of the world's wealth--as something that will be ineffective at fighting global warming and so expensive as to foreclose options to do other things that would be more useful."

I think Dr. DeLong basically is deeply conflicted about environmental matters. He'd like to agree with throwing money away on global warming (aka, "standard 'liberal' dogma") but his economics background informs him that (surprise!) money isn't infinite.

I'd hang around to show him how utterly bogus the IPCC's projections are (which would ease his mind about not following party lines on global warming), but the foaming-at-the-mouth anti-Bush stuff is too boring for me.

Mark Bahner (environmental engineer, armchair psychoanalyst, didn't and won't vote for Bush)

I think that the most crucial question about anthropogenic global warming is, possibly even more than how severe it'll be, how reversible it is. Can we get the CO2 back out of the air?

If some of the research coming out of Duke (sorry, can't find a URL) is right, part of the solution might be restoring the native grasses of the America's. With their extensive root systems, the grasses are deceptively productive at returning carbon to the soil. Rain forest is all well and good, but we might be barking up the wrong tree, so to speak, as a long-term carbon sink. Seems part of the solution would be to provide ranchers with some sort of subsidy to enable them to remove the market pressures that force them to practice poor grazing management. (Which eventually leads to a subdivided and dead ranch, covered up with concrete and McMansions) Nol Ward at http://www.nativehabitat.org/rcrp.html
and Jerry Holechek at http://www.nativehabitat.org/population-jh.html have some ideas.

"Can we get the CO2 back out of the air?"

Wonderful. Let's see if we can precipitate an ice age.

The problem with Lomborg isn't so much his basic idea of picking priorities for the money, but the fact that his research is rather flawed. The institute he leads (Center for Environmental Evaluation) have repeatedly made bizare and false claims in their reports, relyed on wrong data when the right data was easily availabel, etc.
And I won't get started with the problems with his book.
This makes Lomborg the wrong person for the role The Economist and the Danish Goverment have put him in.

Kristjan, there may be some examples of that, but the raving anti-Lomborgians just make fools of themselved. (The SciAm being the worst example; see http://www.lomborg.com/critique.htm .)

For links in the below, see: http://www.veganoutreach.org/spam/20020314.html#news

Instead of debating facts, many have reacted with belittlement and bogus claims, calling the author a “Pollyanna” who would have us ignore the degradation of the environment and put us all in peril. (One of the larger "attacks" was on the pages of Scientific American (not available on-line); see commentary and accompanying article from The Economist.)

The saddest aspect of these knee-jerk responses is that they miss Lomborg’s point:

"We have a finite amount of resources that we can use to address the world’s problems. Because of our limitations, if we avoid a rational analysis, we will not be able to optimize the effects of our action."

As stated by Lomborg in his detailed (and, unlike the SciAm attacks, referenced) discussion:

"Saying that my book is an everything-will-turn-out-fine statement is a rhetorical and entirely misleading treatment of my book. I point out that we should deal with environmental problems, work to decrease air pollution even further, invest in renewable energy research and development etc., as well as tackle the many other, important global problems such as poverty and starvation. The point is that I should strive to make the decisions which actually do good and not just the ones that sound good. This requires straight and honest analysis that is willing to challenge any however well established myth."

Also, on p. 5 of the actual book:

"However, pointing out that our most publicized fears are incorrect does not mean that we should make no effort towards improving the environment. Far from it.... What this information should tell us is not to abandon action entirely, but to focus our attention on the most important problems and only to the extent warranted by the facts."

Or, as pointed out in Nature by Stephen Budiansky (former Washington editor of Nature), “Lomborg’s whole point is that the refusal of some environmental activists to deal honestly with the data harms the credibility of both environmental science and environmentalism.”

A willingness to be dishonest is shown by Stephen Schneider, one of Scientific American's anti-Lomborgians, when he told Discover in 1989 (quoted in the Economist editorial):

"[We] are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we'd like to see the world a better place...To do that we need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public's imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have...Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest."

Where does this leave a rightfully skeptical public if a so-called “authority” admits to a willingness to lie to promote his agenda?

I don't know for sure, but I'll bet Schneider's comments came because scientists, too, have trouble accepting the non-predictability of complex systems, and still don't have a clear language for it. It's the natural tendiency to assume that deduction must rule all. If you eat lots of candy, you will get sick. If you dump more carbon dioxide into the climate, it will go haywire. We just don't know how or where or when. Indeed after it starts happening, we may still dispute the causes and effects. (You ALMOST know when and how you will get sick eating candy, because you've DONE IT BEFORE.) But all complex systems appear to do this. It's not religion, it's inductive empiricism (as are, it appears to me, most of the arguments for free markets in economics). Lomborg is just beside the point. And sometimes he's positively misleading.

At least SA's response to Lomborg's rebuttal is online:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=00040A72-A95C-1CDA-B4A8809EC588EEDF&sc=I100322

The Schneider quote is decidely dodgy as I've pointed out quite a few times, Matt. Check my blog and search for Schneider