Copenhagen Consensus Development Priorities and BANG FOR BUCK

The PSA panelists said nothing about how much global warming their climate policies would avert. That’s hardly surprising, since as Chip Knappenberger has demonstrated, reducing U.S. emissions 83% below 2005 levels by 2050 — the Waxman-Markey emissions-reduction target — would avoid less than 0.2ºC of projected global warming by 2100. That’s an amount too small to be distinguished from the “noise” of inter-annual climate variability. Even if all industrial countries achieve the Waxman-Markey target, this would avoid only 0.4ºC of warming by 2100 — less than 10% of the projected rise in the IPCC’s “fossil intensive” (A1FI) emissions scenario.
Cumulatively, the United States and its allies would have to spend trillions of dollars to achieve such trivial reductions in projected climate change. As a national security strategy, the PSA panelists’ policies are all buck for no bang.
When the PSA panelists call global warming a national security issue, they mainly mean that climate change will aggravate a number of pre-existing threats – e.g., drought, hunger, malaria, coastal flooding — that already cause or contribute to instability and conflict. The panelists would do well to consider Goklany’s research on “focused adaptation.”
Goklany shows that it is much more effective — and far cheaper — to tackle directly, with proven methods, the health and environmental threats that a changing climate might exacerbate than it is to address those threats indirectly via energy-rationing schemes. For example, the Kyoto Protocol, at a cost of $165 billion per year, might reduce deaths from malaria by 0.2% in 2085. In contrast, a $3 billion annual investment in proven anti-malaria methods could reduce malaria deaths by 75%, according to the UN Millennium Development Project.
Bjorn Lomborg’s Copenhagen Consensus project comes to much the same conclusion. Resources available to meet the world’s biggest challenges are finite. Hence, Lomborg sensibly argues, policymakers should invest in those policies that will do the most good per dollar expended.
In 2004, Lomborg convened a panel of eight distinguished economists, including three Nobel Laureates, to answer the question, “What would be the best ways of advancing global welfare, and particularly the welfare of developing countries, supposing that an additional $50 billion in resources were at governments’ disposal?” The panel commissioned “challenge papers” from 10 acknowledged authorities in different policy fields. The authors set out more than 30 policy proposals for the panel’s consideration. The panel, the authors, and two outside experts in each field examined and debated the proposals during a week-long conference. The panel then ranked the proposals in order of desirability:
 
All three climate policy proposals were deemed “bad investments.” Costs would exceed benefits and the policies would save far fewer lives per dollar invested than would competing policy proposals.
Because resources are finite, bad investments tend to crowd out good. Even if climate policies did no positive harm, they could undermine U.S. national security by (a) displacing investment in policies that more effectively  enhance human welfare, and (b) diverting money, expertise, public attention, and political will from the kinds of threats our military forces and intelligence agencies actually know how to do something about.
In fact, however, climate policies have a high potential to do positive harm to U.S. national security, as I will discuss in tomorrow’s post.