In addition to all the goodies from the November 2007 print edition of the magazine, this week Prospect online features Ken Binmore—who designed the 3G telecoms licence auction that raked in £23bn for the British taxpayer in 2000—on “mechanism design,” the theory that won three of its main architects the Nobel economics prize a couple of weeks ago. Mechanism design, argues Binmore, contains important lessons for governments looking to reform public services and regulatory regimes.
Also this week: Willem Marx, who travelled with Benazir Bhutto on her triumphant homecoming from Dubai, explains how the jubilant on-flight atmosphere turned into shock and carnage just hours later when bombs ripped through Bhutto’s motorcade in Karachi. And Bjørn Lomborg replies to Kevin Watkins’s Prospect review of his book Cool It.
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Bjorn Lomborg always sounds reasonable as long as you play along with his slightly solipsistic use of numbers. For instance, each tonne of Carbon costs 2 dollars, compared to 20 dollars to clean it up.
Hmmm sounds good, but what does it mean?
How for instance are human lives valued? Aah, by the old Economist’s Canard “willingness to pay.” And of course, poor people are less “willing” to pay for their lives than the rich are.
Nice.
And what is this about 2.8 degrees C?
Is Bjorn willing to bet that Nature is like a constipated statistician, desperate to sit down with a pencil and work it all out?
Well life is rather more wild than that, and a tonne of evidence (see Fred Pearce’s ‘The Last Generation’) points towards the earth being a chaotic system, highly prone to unpredictable shifts. The chances are if we go past 1.5 or 2 degrees of warming, feedbacks in the system, such as the release of carbon from soils, could land us up at anything from 3 to 6 to 10 degrees, which will most probably cost the Earth.
The IPCC is also needs to sit down with a pencil, since its models assume a gradual increase in CO2, and so do not account for feedbacks within the system changing how much carbon is released and absorbed.
In short, Lomborg’s piece is misleading in the extreme. Climate change is a matter of life and death, and our illusions of stability and control in relation to it are just that, deadly misconceptions.