Cool It, by Bjorn Lomborg

Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming, by Bjorn Lomborg. Vintage Books, 2008. 252 pp. 978-0-307-38653-6.

... in which an economist tells us to stop fussing over global warming because it's a good thing, and nothing we do will make a difference anyway, so let's spend all of our money solving something else.

Anyone who has taken any kind of class in environmental policy, philosophy, etc. has almost certainly read at least an excerpt from Bjorn Lomborg's many writings. As a professor at the Copenhagen Business School, Lomborg's writings are usually related to welfare economics and global human welfare. He is most famous for his book The Skeptical Environmentalist, which has been hugely controversial and influential in environmentalism, both by enraging some environmentalists against him, and by forcing some people to stop and take a step back to evaluate the problem.

In Cool It, Lomborg's main point is this: yes, global warming is happening, but all of the proposed solutions will cost billions of dollars but the improvements will not be monetarily equal to the amount spent. In other words: don't waste your money on the Kyoto Protocol and other nonsense; accept global warming as an inevitability and put your money towards some other problem, like malaria and AIDS.

In Lomborg's praise, the book is an easy, fast read, and seems to be very well researched (the last ~90 pages are citations and footnotes). It's also refreshing to read a book that simply assumes that the reader understands the concept of global warming; Lomborg clearly states from the beginning that he is one of the people who does actually understand that it's happening. Instead, his argument is about what we should do about it. For the lay reader, I have no doubt that this book's arguments would prove to be very convincing. However, for those familiar with Lomborg's work, the fact that the Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty proclaimed Lomborg's previous book (The Skeptical Environmentalist) to be scientifically dishonest makes it hard to always take his statistics and data seriously. But, as I am not an ecologist, or a statistician, or a global health expert, or an economist, there's not much I can do about proving the validity or honesty of his claims.

Lomborg's argument suffers from one crucial problem. His argument is predicated on the assumption that if an investment project doesn't bring back all the money put into it, then it's not worth it. In business, that might be true... why invest billions in a project that will only give back millions? A simple cost-benefit analysis doesn't work for a problem of this magnitude. As anyone who's studied the core issues in environmentalism will know, the inherent value of an unaltered ecosystem or landscape doesn't always translate literally into a financial value measured in dollars. As an extension of this argument, I reject his premise that global warming could be a good thing, since the number of people who freeze to death is greater than the number of people who die of heat exhaustion. Do we only care about humans in this argument? At the risk of sounding callous, isn't the skyrocketing global population one of the factors that put us in this pickle to begin with?

I do agree that a lot of the changes that are becoming popular now will probably make a minimal effect, and some may cost huge amounts of money. But for some people, if the only change they can make is by using just a little less electricity, I don't see the point in condemning their efforts. And yes, the Kyoto Protocol will cost huge amounts of money to implement, but it's an indicator that (most) major governments are willing to move in the right direction. And yes, malaria and food insecurity and lack of access to clean water are important issues and are deserving of significant amounts of resources, but I don't think we have to necessarily choose between problems to solve. Also, many of those problems are related, in some way, to climate change.

I will agree strongly with Lomborg that part of the issue with proposed changes is that legislators seem to think we need to solve the problem right now. Rushing in and trying to immediately axe carbon emissions down to a tiny fraction of their current numbers, and trying to immediately mitigate the effects of global warming, could probably end up being a waste of effort, since it's a global problem that will take decades and decades to fix. However, I don't think that means we should focus on other issues like global health, to the exclusion of issues like climate change. Economics are all well and good for exclusively human problems, but it won't help the other species that die out because we ignore them.

Overall, a well researched, well written, easy to read little book. I don't happen to agree with most of it, but I am glad I read it because his arguments are not without merit. For anyone who likes to keep abreast of the different viewpoints in environmental policy, it's probably an important read.

Hack the Planet, by Eli Kintisch

Hack the Planet, by Eli Kintisch. John Wiley and Sons, 2010. 279 pp. 978-0-470-52426-8.

...in which we learn about some of the outrageous solutions scientists and engineers are proposing to counteract global climate change.

I picked up this book because I'd heard a little about the topic of geoengineering, but I didn't know enough about the topic to have more than a vague feeling of unease about it. Geoengineering, or the field where scientists and engineers essentially "hack" the planet's atmospheric, oceanic, environmental, etc processes in order to achieve the desired result, is still a highly controversial field. There's a lot of infighting among the environmentalist groups over the topic, and scientists can't agree whether geoengineering would work, or if it'd be a good idea. Because geoengineering doesn't call for a reduction in carbon emissions, it's a popular solution with politicians who tend to side with big business. But because it involves massive amounts of tampering with very significant global processes, it's pretty unpopular with many factions within the environmental movement.

The book is written at a level that makes it very accessible to the general public, but it does assume a fairly basic understanding of atmospheric cycling, ocean currents, and climate science. Kintisch does an admirable job of researching his topics thoroughly, and he has quotes and input from people on both sides of the issue. For the most part, the he is pretty impartial when discussing the different proposed experiments, and until the last chapter he lets the reader decide whether these experiments are or aren't a good idea.

Some of the geoengineering solutions in the book include solutions that involve particles in the atmosphere, ocean fertilizing, and improved methods for carbon sequestration that are also beneficial to industry. Kintisch describes several variations on atmospheric particles; all of these proposed solutions involve the dispersion of particles (usually a mist of some kind) to reflect sunlight away from the earth and provide shade. The ocean fertilization experiment involved dumping large amounts of tiny iron particles into the ocean. These iron particles would encourage the growth of large algal blooms. Presumably these algal blooms would remove carbon from the atmosphere, and then when the algae die, they sink to the bottom of the ocean, taking their sequestered carbon with them. Another possible solution involves sequestering carbon in cement used for construction projects.

In addition to the chapter-length discussions on each solution, each chapter is prefaces with a one or two page anecdote about previous attempts to engineer the earth to fix humanity's mistakes. For example: introducing invasive species B to control invasive species A, resulting in a massive derailment of the local ecosystem. Or, the introduction of a new species of fish to Lake Victoria to make it more productive for local fisheries, resulting in 2/3 of the native species going extinct. With the exception of the anecdote that precedes the concluding chapter, all of these stories are stories of disastrous failure.

After discussing the various proposed solutions fairly impartially, Kintisch concludes with what is probably the most important chapter of the book. The final paragraph was, to me, the most powerful in the book:

Control may be comforting, but it's also an illusory burden we should not fall into the trap of seeking. We have no choice but to understand it. Maybe we'll succeed. But hacking our planet is not yet our fate. We might be able to avoid it. Perhaps David Brower, a modern-day romantic if there ever was one, was right: technology does make the world into a cage. Maybe geoenginerring makes it more like a terrarium, an enclosed, controlled garden. Even if geoengineering helps us one day to stave off the worst of the climate crisis, we'll still be inside its walls. (page 243)

Kintisch does a great job of presenting all the wonderful potential that geoengineering has, but anyone with any understanding of humanity's ability to ruin basically everything in the natural world should walk away with at least a shred of doubt about the field. Also, relying exclusively on geoengineering isn't a full solution, it's a band-aid. We'd be treating the symptoms of a problem that we are causing, instead of just, you know, trying not to cause the problem in the first place. God forbid we change our behavior! So much easier to just mitigate the problem later, right?

I should note that Emma did a review of Superfreakonomics. Superfreakonomics has one chapter devoted to the topic of geoengineering, and ultimately supported it. They went so far as to describe one of the geoengineering solutions (adding massive amounts of aerosols to the atmosphere to produce a global cooling effect, never mind its potential effects on ocean currents, agricultural output, etc...) a "fiendishly simple plan" (page 195 of Superfreakonomics). Maybe in terms of economics, it is fiendishly simple, but I completely, whole-heartedly reject the premise that these decisions should be made by people who can only look at it from an economic or political point of view, rather than look at it from a whole-earth perspective.

I strongly recommend Hack the Planet for anyone who has an interest in global climate change, environmental politics, or environmental philosophy. Actually, I recommend it for anyone who has an interest in being alive and the long-term survival of the human race. As much as I am skeptical of relying heavily on geoengineering as a solution, the topic is not going away anytime soon, and if you aren't well-informed on the pros and cons of it, you can't really effectively participate in the discussion surrounding geoengineering.