Still Bjørn: Now that his movie has bombed, Lomborg is back to telling folks “Go Ahead and Guzzle”I completely agree with the initial part of Romm's article, too. Another example of an awkward "centrist", Lomborg has no natural audience. His message is actually incoherent:
See other YouTube videos related to Cool It, too.
If global warming is not the end of the world, as all of us know, it actually pretty much follows that every dollar paid to avoid is a waste of money. You can think that you're wasting your money cleverly or less cleverly, but it's still the same wasting money.
He suddenly says that global warming is a real problem and he claims that there will be cheap sources of energy except that he wants to waste lots of money for the research of alternative energy sources. These are also expenses and the resulting product won't be cheap.
I am convinced that new sources of energy are already studied by too many people and you don't really help anything if you add additional people - because they're less competent and even if they were not, the laws of diminishing returns guarantees that they will make smaller contributions per invested dollar.
Sometimes we see very colorful examples what it means to throw money to this stuff. Most readers remember Alexander Ač, a Slovak fearmonger who is mostly illiterate, both scientifically and linguistically, and who should get subsidies from the EU to spend a few months in a psychiatric asylum because he believes pretty much all conspiracy theories about the looming end of the world.
(To see that Mr Ač is a part of the CzechGlobe, see this SME article automatically translated from Slovak. Note that "Ač" is correctly translated as "Though" haha.)
Instead, the European Union has included him among 150 researchers in the CzechGlobe project that is being given 25 million euros. Imagine, it's $200,000 paid to a completely unhinged moron without the slightest clue about physics or climate science or any related discipline - he's great and I like him, but I can still realize he is a moron - who will do "research" and claim that he has shown that global warming is a problem. A very expensive parrot, indeed.
But there are many other ways how the money is wasted in the business related to global warming. It turned out that Bjørn Lomborg's movie is one of them. It has earned about $62,000 so far (compare with $2,800,000,000 from Avatar) and is now earning about $200 every day. Someone is going to lose a lot of money. If they asked me in advance, I could have told them that I had expected the movie to be a failure. No one has asked me, however. ;-)
Now, people like Lomborg who have wasted lots of other people's money want to recommend us to make similar random investments - into research of technologies that satisfy additional bogus criteria, among other things. Do you really expect that such an investment may be sensible?
In fact, I even agree with Romm that there is a noticeable change of Lomborg's tone. In a recent Slate article, he recommended the readers to Go Ahead and Guzzle. While you can't really say that the content is "totally incompatible" with the movie, the change of the focus seems totally obvious to me.
He apparently wanted the global warming establishment and the part of the public that trust it to accept him as an important player; obviously, the people who don't believe that we should be solving such a "problem" won't be enthusiastic about the movie, just the people who are already thinking about solving the problem may view his opinion as relevant. He expected that they would become excited by his superficial ideas. They didn't so he decided to return to a more skeptical tone.
At this moment, I am convinced that the evidence makes it clear that he primarily cares about his importance, not so much about the actual arguments that are relevant for this debate.
The research into a particular issue also costs some money - in particular, clever people may be expensive and the experiments may be even more expensive. There is absolutely no justification to neglect all these expenses. Someone has to pay them. The people who are employed in this way can't do other useful things and the experiments consume money, time, and energy.
It makes sense to leave the investors to invest as much money into research of a particular question as they find appropriate. I am sure that some of those people will eventually make some significant profit - but I am also sure that if the investment into this problem (or any problem) is too high, the total result will be a loss.
In 5 or 15 years, we may have solar panels that will make solar energy cheaper - even when all expenses are counted - than the fossil fuels. That would be OK but people would still be able to see that most things invested into the solar energy when it was not economically feasible were just wasting the taxpayers' and investors' money.
