Lomborg on Obama's Global Warming Options....

Let's hope he makes the right decisions....

IN ONE OF HIS FIRST public policy statements as America’s president-elect, Barack Obama focused on climate change, and clearly stated both his priorities and the facts on which these priorities rest. Unfortunately, both are weak, or even wrong.

Obama’s policy outline was presented via video to California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Governors’ Global Warming Summit, and has again been shown in Poznan, Poland, to leaders assembled to flesh out a global warming roadmap. According to Obama, “Few challenges facing America and the world are more urgent than combating climate change.”

Such a statement is now commonplace for most political leaders around the world, even though it neglects to address the question of how much we can do to help America and the world through climate policies versus other policies.

Consider, for example, hurricanes in America. Clearly, a policy of reducing CO{-2} emissions would have had zero consequence on Katrina’s devastating impact on New Orleans, where such a disaster was long expected. Over the next half-century, even large reductions in CO{-2} emissions would have only a negligible impact.

Instead, direct policies to address New Orleans’s vulnerabilities could have avoided the huge and unnecessary cost in human misery and economic loss. These should have included stricter building codes, smarter evacuation policies and better preservation of wetlands (which could have reduced the ferociousness of the hurricane’s effects). Most importantly, a greater focus on upkeep and restoration of the levees could have spared the city entirely. Perhaps such preventive actions should be Obama’s priority.

Likewise, consider world hunger. Pleas for action on climate change reflect fears that global warming might undermine agricultural production, especially in the developing world. But global agricultural/economic models indicate that even under the most pessimistic assumptions, global warming would reduce agricultural production by just 1.4 percent by the end of the century. Because agricultural output will more than double over this period, climate change would at worst cause global food production to double not in 2080 but in 2081.

Moreover, implementing the Kyoto Protocol at a cost of $180 billion annually would keep only two million people from going hungry by the end of the century. Yet by spending just $10 billion annually on direct food aid, the United Nations estimates that we could help 229 million hungry people now. For every amount spent on climate policies to save one person from hunger in a hundred years, the same amount could save 5,000 people now. Arguably, this should be among Obama’s top priorities.