Bjorn Lomborg: Our lifestyle is unsustainable and why that's irrelevant

http://www.newsweek.com/2011/06/12/bjorn-lomborg-explains-how-to-save-the-planet.html

by cwan • 15 years ago

40 81 15 years ago

wisty2• 15 years ago

I'm not sure if he's correct. Neo-liberal mainstream economists take it as an article of faith that "everything will be OK in a free market". If we don't innovate early enough, society can collapse. Look at Easter Island.

Nuclear is there as an option, but it's not a pretty one. There's a big lead time on reactors.

As an Australian, I'm very proud of our imminent carbon tax. Businesses will find a way to cut energy use, or generate "green" power before any crisis hits. OK, a carbon cap and trade might do the same, but businesses won't be able to invest as they will be afraid carbon prices will increase or decrease too much. Speculative bubbles, fraud, and the weather would make prices fluctuate too much.

anamax4• 15 years ago

> I'm not sure if he's correct. Neo-liberal mainstream economists take it as an article of faith that "everything will be OK in a free market".

So, you don't believe in innovation on demand.

> As an Australian, I'm very proud of our imminent carbon tax. Businesses will find a way to cut energy use, or generate "green" power before any crisis hits.

Except that you do.

zeemonkee2• 15 years ago

> So, you don't believe in innovation on demand.

Innovation isn't guaranteed to happen "on demand". Some things may not be physically possible, or even if they are, may prove economically or environmentally unfeasable. "Everything will be OK in a free market" is just that - an article of faith.

Tichy18• 15 years ago

"So, you don't believe in innovation on demand."

The demand for cleaner energy is here now. Lomborg wants to dismiss that. His argument is biting it's own head off.

khafra2• 15 years ago

If you believe businesses will unfailingly innovate in response to incipient environmental collapse, why not test that belief by challenging them to innovate in response to sub-optimal cash flows first?

lisper• 15 years ago

"Past performance is no guarantee of future results." Just because technology has saved our sorry ass in the past does not entail that it will continue to do so forever.

pyrhho• 15 years ago

"Past performance is the best indicator of future performance." Technology has saved our sorry ass in the past, so it is likely to continue doing so for the foreseeable future.

tintin• 15 years ago

Not entirely true. Technology can also kill our habitat more quickly. We now know where the fish swim and will catch them all. We now know how to blow up tons of rock to get a little gold...

Greed will always be the source of the problem.

Tichy18• 15 years ago

Except it hasn't. It has saved us in some occasions, but not in others. There where still millions of "unnatural" deaths in the twentieth century. And, similar to what the other comment pointed out, some species are extinct or nearly extinct - technology doesn't seem to have helped them.

What about the recent financial crisis? Not sure how hard it really hit, but nevertheless, technology has not prevented it. Just an example to point out that we do NOT have everything under control.

arethuza• 15 years ago

On the topic of the long term survival of societies I can thoroughly recommend Collapse by Jared Diamond:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse:_How_Societies_Choose_...

While I am generally rather positive about the long term fate of our current society I do worry that blind belief that technological innovation will always deliver solutions is perhaps a bit naive.

Tichy18• 15 years ago

I always remember his example of a society that collapsed after 4000 years, whereas our modern society is maybe around 200 years old. We have no idea whatsoever how sustainable our current lifestyle is.

rrrazdan• 15 years ago

And the major unfair point is that the developed countries, after having exploited and polluted their way to prosperity, want equal cuts from the developing world.[1] [1]http://big5.xinhuanet.com/gate/big5/news.xinhuanet.com/engli...

ThomPete6• 15 years ago

I think many people are missing Lomborgs basic point.

It's not just blind faith in technology but rather technology is the best choice we have now, so instead of using trillions on political statements of intention, let's use them where it matters and that is in trying to innovate and engineer our way out of some of the issues.

Tichy18• 15 years ago

How does a political statement cost trillions? The information contained in the sentence "let's use the money where it matters most" is zero. How do you figure out where it matters most?

The fact is: if people can exploit some loophole (like blowing dirt into the air instead of installing expensive filters), they will do so. They don't really have an incentive to do otherwise. It doesn't have to be laws that gives them an incentive - there could be "transparency", customers could prefer to buy "clean" stuff, hence producers would have an incentive to produce clean.

Without such an incentive, nothing will happen.

acegopher• 15 years ago

I think the original comment about political statements costing trillions are when say the government subsidizes corn ethanol.

There is good consensus that corn ethanol is energy negative, and that it doesn't result in cleaner air or less greenhouse gases due to production costs.

This mis-allocation of capital hinders development of truly better alternatives, and sets back innovation. These setbacks, beyond the cost of the subsidy and the lack of improvement in the areas targeted, do cost trillions.

ThomPete6• 15 years ago

It matters most where you can build markets.

It matters not where it purely a poltical (read most often moral) statement.

Customers don't prefer to buy clean stuff. Most of them prefer to buy cheap stuff. That is the reality, that is the reason discount is doing so well.

cageface2• 15 years ago

This seems like a false dichotomy. Wouldn't the smartest thing be to conserve and work on new technology at the same time?

ThomPete6• 15 years ago

If you have a solution to how to solve the first part then by all means I all ears.

nhaehnle• 15 years ago

The author does not acknowledge the point that e.g. air quality has improved precisely because people have complained about it.

The technological developments and business investments in filtering and related technologies would not have happened without environmental groups putting up a fight.

In a similar way, groups shouting about unsustainability are the ones who actually get people to think about alternatives, which in turn plays one part in moving technology forward.

Of course technology is moved forward by other things as well. But don't underestimate the impact of young people taking up PhDs in relevant subjects partly because of the high visibility of the debate about sustainability.

Tichy18• 15 years ago

We got lucky a few times and now have enjoyed a comparatively long period of time without serious problems. Relatively long time being one generation, so we don't really remember what it feels like to go hungry, struggle to survive in a war and stuff like that.

Unfortunately that doesn't mean that bad things can't happen again, just because we don't remember them. In Japan they had ancient stones in the land warning about places where previous Tsunamis had hit. Unfortunately nobody of the "younger generations" cared about them anymore...

This attitude of "technology will sort it out every time" is just stupid and not really supported by history. I have no doubt that humans will survive, somehow. Doesn't mean that there can't be turmoil, millions of deaths and so on on the way anymore.

danparsonson4• 15 years ago

I think there are a couple of points that the article skips over:

1) The planet's human population is much greater than it was even 50 years ago (http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met_y=sp_pop_...) and continues to rise

2) We still don't fully understand the impact of widespread habit and species loss

1) is important because each person requires a minimum amount of energy, in whatever form, to sustain them, so we need to improve our technology year-on-year just to stay at the same level of 'resource drain'.

2) is important because the idea that the natural world will recuperate once we've developed more sympathetic ways of existing with it may actually be flawed. There is some evidence to suggest that the biosphere is a self-regulating system of which we are now breaking or removing many parts. Any such system, however resilient, can only stand so much of that before it collapses.

Of course technological development is crucial to our long term survival, but in my opinion this doesn't make short term fixes irrelevant.

hkolek• 15 years ago

ad 1: http://overpopulationisamyth.com

bjelkeman-again• 15 years ago

That is a very shallow set of arguments from a self confessed pro-life group. A better place to start understanding the complexities and impact on environment from a large population is probably Nature’s special on planetary boundaries.

http://www.nature.com/news/specials/planetaryboundaries/inde...

danparsonson4• 15 years ago

That discusses the effect of population growth on poverty - where does it talk about the effect of population growth on the environment?

iaskwhy2• 15 years ago

According to Hans Rosling on a TED talk, overpopulation is not really a problem: http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_y...

In short: as soon as the economy of a country improves, its population growth stabilizes (and sometimes it even decreases like in Europe).

danparsonson4• 15 years ago

That was very interesting, thanks, but it says nothing directly about planet-wide population growth; only that family sizes tend to get smaller and infant mortality rates to decrease as a societies get richer - less people are born but they tend to live longer.

My original point is that if the population is increasing at all, that will at least partially offset gains in efficiency brought about by newer technologies, and since population growth compounds over time, we'll need to make bigger and bigger gains just to maintain the status quo in terms of absolute energy and resource usage.

Qerub• 15 years ago

Arithmetic, Population and Energy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY

hootmon• 15 years ago

According to this Robber Baron apologist, I am 10 times better off than I was in the 50s. Lets see, my dad, in the fifties could afford from his average salary to buy a new car every 2 years. Guess what in my so called better life, I buy a new car every 15 years. yea thats progress. I think this tool lumps the progress of the top 2% in with the rest of us smucks to come up with his baloney good news. The average wage buys less today than it did years ago, plus the average wage is falling and benefits are disappearing. The good news just keeps coming...

tomjen3• 15 years ago

But the car you can buy has more safety and comfort features than the one your dad could buy back then.

api4• 15 years ago

But the car you bought then every two years didn't last as long, wasn't as safe, wasn't as comfortable, got worse gas mileage, didn't accelerate as well, had no power steering, etc.

But I do agree that the middle class is in trouble in America. Today to be middle class you need at least a BS degree or equivalent skills and you have to constantly re-educate, and that bar appears to be rising steadily.

yesbabyyes• 15 years ago

I think this is the case: In the fifties, there were a lot fewer people who were as rich as your dad, than there are people today who are as rich as you. At the same time, more people today want and can afford cars and other expensive things. Thus, even though we are constantly using resources more efficiently, you are competing with more people for resources today than your father in the fifties.

This is natural and a good thing: If Earth can't sustain very many people buying cars every 2 years, then we can't buy new cars every 2 years. We have to use resources more efficiently. It's a similar situation with fuel: For a long time, we built stronger engines that consumed the same amount of fuel, instead of building engines that used less fuel for more efficient use. Later that trend reversed. A similar thing happened with computers and their energy use.

I hope my kids won't have to buy more than one car in their life.

erikstarck• 15 years ago

I'm surprised by all the negative comments.

Lomborg makes the simple suggestion to rely on the most proven processes we have to solve problems: science, technology and trade.

How can this in a community of hackers and entrepreneurs be so provocative?

wgren• 15 years ago

That is a false dichotomy - lots of people suggest we rely on science and technology, that is not what many people dislike about Lomborg. Well, it is not what I dislike about him anyway, I can't speak for everyone.

Arguing against him is not arguing against science. Actually, it is my respect for science that makes me wary of him. He always seem to suggest simple populist solutions to complex problems.

ThomPete6• 15 years ago

The populist solutions are the political summits that year after year claim to want to solve the worlds pollution yet do nothing.

igrekel• 15 years ago

Well, my personal annoyance with that is that it is often used to say: "See the problem will resolve itself by itself, or someone else will do it so we don't have to work on it".

The other thing is that while its true that in the past, the problems eventually became irrelevant, I don't think it is predictable and I don't believe we should make a law out of that. Maybe it is a fluke or maybe the timing could be off next time. I don't believe there is a a force that gives us a right to exist, a magical mechanism that makes us pull out ourselves out of any trouble. We have to do it ourselves. I understand we should hear this as "Just don't throw yourselves around like headless chickens" but what I hear is just "Don't worry, do nothing, don't care" and that is not at all inline with being an entrepreneur.

api4• 15 years ago

Because we're also a community of scientists. Entrepreneurship and trade can do a lot, but it cannot violate the laws of physics.

Peak oil (and gas, and coal) is physics. The laws of physics are absolute.

The lost energy from declining fossil fuel EROEI must be either replaced or the demand must be destroyed. Replacing all that energy seems very unlikely... I read about this problem a lot. Demand destruction can occur through efficiency improvements or through simply not buying, not driving, not using.

If that's not enough, demand destruction can occur through war, famine, and death. The point is that this will happen if we can't make up the gap, and no amount of wishful thinking will change it. Nature doesn't care.

randallsquared• 15 years ago

Replacing all that energy seems very unlikely...

It only seems politically unlikely. Even at the highest estimates of 6 billion USD per 1GW plant, building 500 of them would provide 4Twh per year [1], almost as much as the 4.4Twh that the US now generates, and for about the cost of the Iraq and Afganistan wars. We already know the US could have spent this much money: it did. The US could have spent that money on nuclear, or it could have spent it on lofting solar power satellites, or even massive solar installations, and any of those would have essentially erased our dependence on oil, at least.

But even though it wasn't spent on that, all is not lost! Current coal reserves are good, energy-wise (not necessarily environmentally) for at least a hundred years, which gives plenty of time to grow a space-based energy policy, or to make a policy about nuclear power that makes sense, or whatever.

Maybe Lomborg makes these points in the article; it seemed as though he was only saying things I agreed with, so I didn't finish.

[1] this assumes that each one is operational for 11 months of the year, and that they do something useful like providing energy for methane for gasoline replacement during trough times of day

khafra2• 15 years ago

> In fact, would-be catastrophes have regularly been pushed aside throughout human history, and so often because of innovation and technological development. We never just continue to do the same old thing. We innovate and avoid the anticipated problems.

The thing about the Anthropic Principle is that it only protects you in the past, not in the future. We're here now because our civilization overcame its past problems; but any speculator can tell you that past performance is no guarantee of future results.

api4• 15 years ago

The thing we really have to come to terms with is that the future is unpredictable. Both the "doomers" and the pollyannas fall down here. Past performance says nothing whatsoever about future performance.

Nice well-behaved Newtonian systems are amenable to prediction by mathematical regression. Messy, complex, chaotic living systems are not. Everything changes, and changes how it changes, and changes how it changes how it changes, and ...

Zakharov2• 15 years ago

I think Lomborg's got a good argument in favor of a conclusion he leaves unstated (and may, in fact, not favor) - that some portion of the money governments would spend on sustainability should instead be spent on finding a proactive solution to climate change, e.g. extracting large quantities of carbon from the atmosphere.

Doing nothing and hoping someone independently solves the problem strikes me as an unacceptable risk; there is little market incentive at the moment to reduce environmental damage. A carbon-trading scheme would create such an incentive, but would no doubt create its own inefficiencies. Markets are great at dealing with resource shortages, for example whale oil, but quite bad at dealing with negative externalities, e.g. air pollution. It took government intervention to clean up London (I think? I don't have any sources on this).

Spending money on proactive solutions encourages economic growth instead of discouraging it, and can lead to future benefits as "green technology" leads to new advances. On the other hand, it's somewhat risky as most avenues of inquiry will lead to dead ends, and any geo-engineering technology that becomes widely adopted could have nasty side-effects.

api4• 15 years ago

This guy is ignoring the twin elephants in the living room: the unbelievably massive amount of energy that we obtain from fossil fuels, and the reliance on the modern financial system on continuous growth simply to maintain the status quo.

These are linked issues.

All fossil fuels will peak this century. It's not politics... it's physics. No amount of wishful thinking will change that. Actually, I suspect they will all peak before 2050. Many knowledgeable people think oil has already peaked.

Peaking doesn't mean running out, it means exponentially declining EROEI (energy return on energy invested). There's plenty of oil left, but when it takes a barrel of oil to get a barrel of oil we are out of oil.

Nothing except maybe nuclear has the muscle right now to fill the gap for electricity generation. Just try to sell that now, post-Fukushima. Nothing except biofuel can presently fill the gap for transportation, and it is dubious that biofuels can scale to those levels.

Does this mean apocalypse? I'm actually not a "doomer" per se. But consider this: as we pass peak on all fossil fuels, the vast majority of our surplus energy and labor will have to go to simply treading water and maintaining our standard of living in the face of rapidly declining energy availability. There's also going to be a lot of demand destruction: people buying less, traveling less, using less.

All that does spell doom for our financial system. Even a short interruption in growth results in financial catastrophe, since without continuous growth you get a wave of debt defaults.

It could be a very chaotic century.

Edit: but on the upside, there's going to be a ton of entrepreneurial opportunities around saving energy, making energy, and storing energy. Personally I think IT isn't where it's at... if I wanted to get back into entrepreneurship now (and I might in the future) I'd get into something energy-related.

ap22213• 15 years ago

Nothing like standing up a straw man and then tearing it down.

The situations that are cited in the article seem like apples when comparing to the situational oranges of today. A shaky foundation like this hardly seems like a good place to build a valid logical argument. But, it sure does look cool.

Tichy18• 15 years ago

Just wondering, have science and free markets ever resolved a tragedy of the commons situation (except for destroying the resource)? I think the "original" solution for the sheep and lawns was to erect fences, which seems to me to be a purely political solution. It doesn't seem so different from issuing CO2 shares.

stayjin• 15 years ago

It is the irony of the tragic nature of human race: we are both, descendants of Promitheus, who courageously fought for our right to harness greater powers, but also of Pandora who just did not have the maturity to know what NOT to poke,

It is so ironic, there are so many different diets, just to conceal the simple fact that if one eats excessively they will get fat and the simple fact that if one wants to be in good shape, there is a very simple straightforward answer, eat less move more. Instead we busy ourselves with the new " scientific breakthrough" that allows us to be eating bacon all year long and then drink the magic pill and wear our bikini just in time for the miss skinny contest.

P.s. The interesting dude is Odisseas, who before going close ro the sirens, he assessed the risk and decided, to hear their sing but not

Bjorn Lomborg: Our lifestyle is unsustainable and why that's irrelevant

Related Stories