Antinuclear

Australian tax-payers funding shonky climate economics with $4m Bjørn Lomborg centre

 So is this “methodology” the Abbott Government has spent $4million on any good?……

while cost-benefit analysis can be useful, it doesn’t work when you apply it to climate change policy.

How do you price, for example, the loss of a Pacific island nation and what that would mean for the cultures that have thrived there? What’s the price losing multiple species of flora and fauna or the Great Barrier Reef Jotzo adds:

Climate change is exceptional because it has all of these dimensions that go beyond the practical capability of cost benefit analysis.

Australian taxpayers funding climate contrarian’s methods with $4m Bjørn Lomborg centre Graham Readfearn, Guardian 23 Apr 15   Lomborg’s think tank methods underplay the impact of climate change and have ‘no academic credibility’ says leading climate economist. Danish political scientist and climate change contrarian Bjørn Lomborg says the poorest countries in the world need coal and climate change just isn’t as big a problem as some people make out.

Australia’s Prime Minister Tony Abbott says “coal is good for humanity” and there are more pressing problems in the world than climate change, which he once described as “crap” but now says he accepts.

So it’s not surprising then that the latter should furnish the former with $4 million of taxpayer funds to start an Australian arm of Lomborg’s Copenhagen Consensus Centre (CCC) at the University of Western Australia’s business school.

The CCC has consistently said that targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions are too expensive and money should be spent elsewhere

After a couple of weeks of doubt and confusion over the origins and the funding of the centre, latest reports suggest that the idea came from the Prime Minister’s office.

A spokesperson for the Prime Minister told Fairfax media it was “the government’s decision to bring the Lomborg consensus methodology to Australia”.

More on this “methodology” and some pretty fundamental problems with it in a bit.

Students at UWA are gathering names on a petition and campaigning in protest, saying Lomborg’s appointment as an adjunct (unpaid) professor there damages the university’s reputation and is an embarrassment. The University’s Student Guild claimed that “students, staff and alumni” were outraged.

Former government climate commissioner Tim Flannery, whose Climate Commission was defunded when the Abbott government won office, said the funding was “an insult to the scientific community”.

A $4m methodology? So is this “methodology” the Abbott Government has spent $4million on any good?……

Dr Frank Jotzo, director of the Centre for Climate Ecnomics and Policy at the Australian National University, was once invited to write a paper for Lomborg’s centre in 2008, which was sharply critical of how the cost of the impacts of climate change were treated.

He told me:

Within the research community, particularly within the economics community, the Bjorn Lomborg enterprise has no academic credibility. It is seen as an outreach activity that is driven by specific set of objectives in terms of bringing particular messages into the public debate and in some cases making relatively extreme positions seem more acceptable in the public debate……..

otzo told me there are two key ways in which Lomborg’s methods manage to push climate change down the list of priorities.

Firstly, it uses low estimates of the cost of each tonne of carbon dioxide using economic modeling techniques which fail to properly price the impacts of climate change.

Estimates of this “social cost of carbon” vary massively. A study led by Stanford University scientists in January, for example, tried to better represent the costs of climate change impacts and found that each tonne of carbon dioxide had a cost to society of $220, compared to US government estimates of about $37.

Secondly, these economic methods allow for the use of what’s known as “discount rates”.

For example, if you buy a car that uses less fuel but costs more to buy, people will tend to discount the benefit because it takes a few years to get back the extra money you spent.

In short, it’s a way of putting a price on human impatience (imagine telling a person living in 50 years time that you decided not to cut emissions in 2015 because you thought they were worth less dollars than you are now).

On the point of discount rates, Jotzo is blunt:

There is no broadly ethical case that can be made for present generations to be so selfish to say that we will not invest in mitigating climate change because the benefits of our investment today will accrue to future generations and not to us.

What’s more, Jotzo says that while cost-benefit analysis can be useful, it doesn’t work when you apply it to climate change policy.

What’s more, Jotzo says that while cost-benefit analysis can be useful, it doesn’t work when you apply it to climate change policy.

How do you price, for example, the loss of a Pacific island nation and what that would mean for the cultures that have thrived there? What’s the price losing multiple species of flora and fauna or the Great Barrier Reef Jotzo adds:

Climate change is exceptional because it has all of these dimensions that go beyond the practical capability of cost benefit analysis. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/planet-oz/2015/apr/23/australia-paying-4-million-for-bjrn-lomborgs-flawed-methods-that-downgrade-climate-change

April 25, 2015 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | AUSTRALIA - NATIONAL, climate change - global warming, politics, Western Australia