Bjorn Lomborg For Nobel Peace Prize

It's hard for any thinking person to make the connection - how is a Nobel Peace Prize connected to current local or global environmental issues. Yes, I read some of those reports on water wars and apparent other conflicts due to environmental causes. But they are all theoretical. As far as I know, all wars are fought over boundaries and economic loss, i.e. for big business (like, say, East India Company) - not for water or wetlands or dead fish. For argument sake, let's say there is a connection between peace and environment.

The front-running candidate for this year's prize is fairly well know. One reads news reports that Al Gore, former US vice-president, is lobbying hard using his Hollywood, Euro-politicians, and of course, various, so called environmental, NGOs connections to make it happen. He'll probably get it - at least for creating a fake movie and using his bully pulpit to make up stories about the impending gloom and doom due to global warming. After all, the Nobel committee gave Jimmy Carter the prize, in 2002, just to slap Bush around, who was building up to Iraq invasion. Jimmy Carter has been building houses for the poor Christians around the world for over a decade - not much peace making there. The committee is as much a political animal as it can get.

But the man who truly deserves the Nobel Peace Prize (if the connection between peace and environment still stands) is Bjorn Lomborg.

In his new book, Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming, Bjorn, after taking into consideration various, so called, catastrophic scenarios by 2100 due to global warming proposes sane solutions to deal with manageable problems caused by global warming in much more cost effective way.

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Environmental groups say that the only way to deal with the effects of global warming is to make drastic cuts in carbon emissions -- a project that will cost the world trillions (the Kyoto Protocol alone would cost $180 billion annually). The research I've done over the last decade, beginning with my first book, "The Skeptical Environmentalist," has convinced me that this approach is unsound; it means spending an awful lot to achieve very little. Instead, we should be thinking creatively and pragmatically about how we could combat the much larger challenges facing our planet... A one-foot rise in sea level isn't a catastrophe, though it will pose a problem, particularly for small island nations. But let's remember that very little land was lost when sea levels rose last century. It costs relatively little to protect the land from rising tides: We can drain wetlands, build levees and divert waterways. As nations become richer and land becomes a scarcer commodity, this process makes ever more sense: Like our parents and grandparents, our generation will ensure that the water doesn't claim valuable land... The IPCC tells us two things: If we focus on economic development and ignore global warming, we're likely to see a 13-inch rise in sea levels by 2100. If we focus instead on environmental concerns and, for instance, adopt the hefty cuts in carbon emissions many environmental groups promote, this could reduce the rise by about five inches. But cutting emissions comes at a cost: Everybody would be poorer in 2100. With less money around to protect land from the sea, cutting carbon emissions would mean that more dry land would be lost, especially in vulnerable regions such as Micronesia, Tuvalu, Vietnam, Bangladesh and the Maldives... As sea levels rise, so will temperatures. It seems logical to expect more heat waves and therefore more deaths. But though this fact gets much less billing, rising temperatures will also reduce the number of cold spells. This is important because research shows that the cold is a much bigger killer than the heat. According to the first complete peer-reviewed survey of climate change's health effects, global warming will actually save lives. It's estimated that by 2050, global warming will cause almost 400,000 more heat-related deaths each year. But at the same time, 1.8 million fewer people will die from cold... Of course, it's not just humans we care about. Environmentalists point out that magnificent creatures such as polar bears will be decimated by global warming as their icy habitat melts. Kyoto would save just one bear a year. Yet every year, hunters kill 300 to 500 polar bears, according to the World Conservation Union. Outlawing this slaughter would be cheap and easy -- and much more effective than a worldwide pact on carbon emissions... The typical cost of cutting a ton of CO2is currently about $20. Yet, according to a wealth of scientific literature, the damage from a ton of carbon in the atmosphere is about $2. Spending $20 to do $2 worth of good is not smart policy. It may make you feel good, but it's not going to stop global warming. We need to reduce the cost of cutting emissions from $20 a ton to, say, $2. That would mean that really helping the environment wouldn't just be the preserve of the rich but could be opened up to everyone else -- including China and India, which are expected to be the main emitters of the 21st century but have many more pressing issues to deal with first. [Chill Out - WaPo]

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Here is an excellent presentation of his ideas in the book. (It's about an hour.)