Copyright 2009 International Herald Tribune
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The International Herald Tribune
September 5, 2009 Saturday
SECTION: Pg. 17
LENGTH: 546 words
HEADLINE: Geoengineergin wins a high-profile advocate;
In the Blogs: Green Inc.
BYLINE: John M. Broder
BODY:
ABSTRACT
Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish political scientist, says that the most cost-effective way to offset global warming is through technologies like so-called marine cloud whitening.
FULL TEXT
Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish political scientist (who found fame as the author of ''The Skeptical Environmentalist,'') has completed a study of the best ways to address the warming of the planet.
His chief finding: The most cost-effective and technically feasible approach is through geoengineering, the use of technology to deliberately alter the earth's climate. Specifically, Mr. Lomborg, along with the scientists and economists he has assembled, found that the most promising avenue was to invest $9 billion in accelerated research on so-called marine cloud whitening technology.
The idea is to create vast fleets of robot ships to pump seawater droplets into the clouds above the oceans to make them reflect more sunlight back into space. Mr. Lomborg said he was relying on a paper, ''An Analysis of Climate Engineering as a Response to Climate Change,'' by J. Eric Bickel of the University of Texas at Austin and Lee Lane of the American Enterprise Institute, for his conclusions.
He acknowledges that this sounds a bit like a salt-spray-in-the-sky solution to a vastly complex problem, but he is convinced that it holds more promise than the policies discussed or tried so far, including carbon taxes, global cap-and-trade programs and large-scale deployment of existing technologies like so-called clean-diesel cars.
He also admits that any climate-altering plan could have dangerous unforeseen consequences.
''What we're proposing is research to make sure that all the concerns are addressed,'' Mr. Lomborg, who looks a bit like a surfer and talks like a television evangelist, said Thursday in Washington. ''There is good reason to believe this works - and it's 1,000 times better than what we're proposing to do now.''
Mr. Lomborg, under the auspices of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, which he heads, spent the past several days reviewing a series of research papers with a panel of 21 economists, including three Nobel laureates.
They ranked various approaches to climate change based on their cost and effectiveness, and geoengineering came out on top, followed by stepped-up investment in energy technology that would leapfrog fossil fuels and the current crop of clean-but-expensive alternatives like wind, solar and geothermal. The group also identified carbon capture as another potentially cost-effective way to reduce carbon emissions.
At the other end of the scale, Mr. Lomborg found that global taxes on carbon dioxide emissions, ranging from 50 cents a ton to $68 a ton, were the worst way to address the problem. Too low a tax has no effect on the atmosphere and too high a tax impoverishes the population for too little benefit, the team found.
Mr. Lomborg has advocated a technology-based solution to climate change for some years and has drawn a lot of heat for his views. But he isn't budging. He says that the Kyoto protocol and the talks scheduled for his native Copenhagen in December are a waste of time because countries will not agree to policy prescriptions that are costly, have uncertain outcomes and unevenly distribute the burden of emissions cuts among countries.
LOAD-DATE: September 9, 2009
