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Lomborg is Julian Simon's intellectual heir. The heretical economist had first questioned the Litany in his 1981 book, The Ultimate Resource. Simon explained how and why humanity wouldn't run out of food or energy or other resources. His short answer: when institutions foster innovation and property rights are secure, scarcity never wins the race against human creativity.
Though dire predictions have been repeatedly refuted by experience, they continue. For example, the website Life After the Oil Crash claims:
Civilization as we know it is coming to an end soon … . [W]orldwide demand for oil will outpace worldwide production … by a significant margin. As a result, the price will skyrocket, oil-dependant economies will crumble, and resource wars will explode … . [W]e may find ourselves slipping into [a] post-industrial stone age.
This would be tragic if it weren't so remarkably silly. Whatever the actual course of our energy future, there is no reason—historical, economic, or technical—to believe the eventual transition will threaten civilization.
Though Lomborg clearly cares about the natural world, he takes an economist's perspective—that is, he is primarily concerned with improving human welfare. Cool It, a tightly written and highly readable book, is built around the assumption that our goal is to improve the overall condition of humanity, and that in a world of limited resources choices will be made. Action in one area means we must forgo action in another. Lomborg then asks a straightforward question: which policies provide the most benefit for our investment?
In this respect, Cool It is an extension of Lomborg's Copenhagen Consensus project, which asked some of the world's leading economists, "What would be the best ways of advancing global welfare, and particularly the welfare of developing countries, supposing that an additional $50 billion of resources were at governments' disposal?" The economists participating in the project ranked the world's ten biggest problems as identified by the United Nations: civil conflicts, climate change, communicable diseases, education, financial stability, governance, hunger and malnutrition, migration, trade reform, and water and sanitation. In arriving at their rankings the panel considered both the impact of each problem and the potential for cost-effective response.
The group's highest priority was preventing the spread of HIV/AIDS. A relatively small investment ($27 billion) would yield extraordinarily high benefits—nearly 30 million new infections averted by 2010. This is especially critical for progress in Africa, where AIDS threatens to collapse entire societies. Climate change received the lowest ranking. Why? Not because these experts doubt the seriousness of the problem. Yet enormous expenditures would be required to achieve very small reductions in greenhouse gases—and the benefits are uncertain. The panel declared current abatement strategies (e.g., the Kyoto protocol) "a bad use of our finite resources."
Just as local churches must allocate their limited resources (what proportion of your church's annual budget, for instance, is devoted to supporting missions?), so societies must choose among competing goods and values (e.g., more health care, safer roads, or more funding for education). It is intellectually and morally irresponsible to dodge, discount, or deny the logic of opportunities foregone. This is the take-home message of Cool It.
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