We live in a world of desperate inequalities, grinding poverty and disease. On this website last week Bjorn Lomborg eloquently argued that we must prioritise – and that tackling climate change must be put on the back-burner until we’ve solved more pressing and ‘manageable’ problems. He cites curing AIDS as an example.

But his analysis is deeply flawed, for three key reasons, and in truth only massive international efforts to avert the worst consequences of climate change now can prevent an exacerbation of global poverty and devastation on an unprecedented scale.

First, Lomborg assumes we have to make choices between separate options that are, in reality, inseparable. A habitable climate is a precondition for being able to address other problems.  By failing to address climate change, we undermine our efforts to address almost every other poverty-related challenge.

An unstable climate will exacerbate poverty.  But if we fail to address poverty, this in turn will drive greater climate change.  The idea that we can delay one until we have solved the other shows a complete misunderstanding of the interconnectedness of these phenomena.

Climate change experts are clear that the process of global warming will become ever-faster thanks to feedback effects as we pass ‘tipping points’ – such as the rise in sea temperatures driving the melting icecaps making the poles darker, and better able to absorb solar energy, in turn rising the sea temperature yet further.

Delaying action can only increase the likelihood of climate change becoming uncontrollable and unpredictable – crucially, harder and more expensive to try to slow down in future.

Lomborg states that by breaking the circle of poverty, we make people less vulnerable to the effects of climate change.  But if we do it the way he suggests – “by ensuring everybody can get rich enough to afford kerosene” – that very process will exacerbate climate change and its effects.  What we should be doing is ensuring people in developing countries have access to sustainable technologies so that we can combine development with sustainability.

Secondly, even if it were possible to separate the reality of climate change from poverty, he adopts the methodology of the so-called ‘Copenhagen consensus’ at face value. Applying a crude cost-benefit analysis (CBA) to an issue as complex as climate change is pointless.  CBA is a sensible tool to help us make narrow choices over routes to achieve goals we have already agreed, but it cannot help us to choose those goals.  For that we have politics.

In fact, the Copenhagen Consensus is little more than a demonstration of the extraordinary vanity of many economists to believe that all choices can be boiled down to calculations of monetary value.

And then finally Lomborg falls into a common trap: he assumes that all efforts to deal with climate change will be net costs, ignoring  the fact that fighting climate change might provide us with more money for purposes such as health and nutrition in developing countries, not less.

Contraction and Convergence, for example, is a widely supported formula which envisages a trading scheme whereby resources flow to developing countries and we tackle climate change at the same time.

Similarly, revenues from green taxes could be spent on health and nutrition in developing countries.  Moreover, the model ignores the potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by conversion to cleaner energy sources and energy efficiency.

In short, Lomborg over-estimates the costs of addressing climate change, and under-estimates costs of not acting.

Yes, we must prioritise our foreign aid efforts to ensure they do most good for those most in need, but tackling climate change is not a foreign aid project.

By contrast, climate change is an issue which affects every aspect of public policy, and should perhaps better be characterised as a threat to national and international security which should command resources and political efforts from these budgets.

It is an urgent, global problem, and if we are to stave off its worst impacts we need to change the very ways we run our economies. The objective of government must move from the pursuit of economic growth at all costs to the pursuit of sustainability and social justice. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions means a shake-up of business as usual – not a reprioritisation of foreign aid budgets. Failure will worsen poverty and inequality on an unimaginable scale and we must act now: every year we delay brings us closer to another tipping point after which climate change accelerates and the chances – and costs – of preventing disaster lengthen.

BBC Online article