This assumes all policies are perfectly effective. The corresponding endnote states: “The average estimated cost of the EU 80 percent greenhouse gas emissions reduction by 2050 is a loss of 5.14 percent of GDP as estimated by seven regional models (Knopf et al. It is inconceivable that such spending will go unchallenged.” This is more than all the EU’s current spending on education, health, environment, housing, defense, police, and courts. In his desperate attempt to persuade readers that cutting greenhouse gas emissions is far too expensive, Dr Lomborg throughout his book doubles cost estimates that he finds in the literature relating to policies by the EU to cut greenhouse gases.įor instance, on page 110 in Chapter 7, Dr Lomborg states: “If the European Union sticks to its climate promises for 2050, it alone could end up paying more than $2.5 trillion per year in climate costs – 10 percent of its entire GDP. It can be inferred from the omission of these figures from his book that Dr Lomborg seemingly has no complaints about the much larger scale of subsidies for fossil fuels! Illegitimately doubling the cost estimates of action by the European Union Almost half of this figure is due to the fact that the prices of fossil fuels do not take account of the death and illness caused through local air pollution, an issue that Dr Lomborg overlooks. of the same publication by the IEA states: “We estimate that artificially low prices for fossil fuels for end-users around the world involved subsidies totalling just over $300 billion in 2017.”Īnother study, published by the International Monetary Fund in 2019, concluded that all implicit and explicit subsidies for fossil fuels would have reached $5.2 trillion, equivalent to 6.5 per cent of global GDP, in 2017.
However, Dr Lomborg does not find any room in his book to inform readers of the much larger scale of subsidies for fossil fuels. The graph shows projections of total support for renewables for power generation rising from $143 billion in 2017 to a peak of about $300 billion in 2035 in its ‘New Policies Scenario’. The book’s endnotes indicate that Dr Lomborg has estimated these figures from a graph on page 256 of the World Energy Outlook 2018, published by the International Energy Agency (IEA). For instance, he states on page 110: “New renewable energy sources like solar and wind cost $141 billion annually in subsidies globally, and matter little in the global energy supply.” On page 173, he states: “Globally, in 2020 taxpayers will pay $141 billion to subsidize inefficient solar and wind energy.” Ignoring the costs of fossil fuel subsidiesĭr Lomborg frequently complains about subsidies provided to new clean technologies, but he often fails to mention the scale of support that fossil fuels receive. Miscalculating the ‘optimal’ level of global warming.Cherry-picking an outdated model estimate of the costs of climate change impacts.Misrepresenting the impact of the Paris Agreement on climate change.Illegitimately doubling the cost estimates of action by the European Union.
Ignoring the costs of fossil fuel subsidies.This commentary details five examples of Dr Lomborg’s misuse of outdated, concocted and misinterpreted numbers that are central to his ‘lukewarmer’ argument in the following ways: And he has promoted them apparently secure in the knowledge that they will not be fact-checked by book publishers or newspaper comment editors.
Overall, the numbers presented by Dr Lomborg, who has a PhD in political science, understate the potential economic impacts of climate change and exaggerate the costs of cutting greenhouse gases.
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He has been characteristically energetic in persuading right-wing newspapers, particularly those owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, such as The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post and The Australian, to advertise his book for free in their opinion columns.īut, like his previous contributions to this issue, Dr Lomborg’s arguments are based on fantastical numbers that have little or no credibility. Bjorn Lomborg’s new book False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet attempts to convince readers that the impacts of climate change have been exaggerated, particularly by the media, and that much of the current effort to tackle rising greenhouse gas emissions represents an over-reaction.
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