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Copenhagen Consensus

Revision as of 05:02, 9 April 2004 by Bob Burton (talk | contribs) (add material from The Economist editorial)

The Copenhagen Consensus is a flagship attempt by Bjorn Lomborg's Environmental Assessment Institute to redefine global priorities in line with his attacks on the Kyoto agreement, which he claims is costly, politically untenable, and of dubious benefit.

Contents

History

In early March 2004, Lomborg held a media briefing in London announcing the conference. "The world faces a number of serious problems such as pollution, hunger and disease. Which problem should be addressed first? There are 800 million people starving, 2.5 billion people lacking sewerage, and billions affected by climate change. We all wish that there were money enough to solve all problems. But our means are limited. Therefore policy-makers prioritize every day, but not always on the best basis. Copenhagen Consensus will provide a framework to allow us to make better prioritizations," Lomborg wrote in a media statement.

On April 7, Lomborg, Jagdish Bhagwati, the Washington correspondent for The Economist, Dominic Ziegler, and the U.S. marketing director for Cambridge University Press, Sloane Lederer, held a U.S. launch at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.[1]

Due to take place over May 24-28 2004 - with the support of The Economist magazine, it will take the form of a meeting of a selection of nine eminent, Western, generally right-wing economists. These economists will consider a set of ten "challenge papers" on subjects such as education and climate change, and prioritise economic solutions to these problems. The ten challenge papers will be published as a collection by Cambridge University Press, which published the English language version of Lomborg's The Sceptical Environmentalist.

The experts will discuss the 10 essential problems selected by Lomborg: climate change, communicable diseases, conflicts, education, financial instability, governance and corruption, malnutrition and hunger, migration, sanitation and water, and subsidies and trade barriers.

According to an editorial in The Economist the issues selected were selected by the panel from a list developed by Lomborg's institute which in turn were selected "from aims identified in various contexts by the United Nations and other international bodies." [2] 

"A modest undertaking", Editorial, The Economist, March 4, 2004.

Since the conference was first announced, five of the seven board members of the EAI have resigned: two for personal reasons, and three in protest at the conference, which they say goes far beyond the EAI's original remit by considering subjects such as financial instability, corrupt governance and infectious diseases. [3], [4]

It has been strongly criticised by NGOs such as Oxfam for drawing attention away from the existing consensus built up over several years and codified in the United Nations Millennium Development Goals.

It has also attracted criticism for an approach which tries to define development goals without involving any representatives from developing countries.

Finally, it has been questioned if a panel of exclusively free-market thinkers, several of whom have published views sceptical of the Kyoto consensus, can produce what is supposedly a neutral output on the issue.

As Australian economist and blogger, John Quiggan, wrote: "What can we say about this list? The Nobel prizewinners are obviously eminent, but they're not the names that spring to the front of my mind when I think about a question like setting global priorities for development and the environment. Heckman is a micro-econometrician, Smith is an experimenter, focusing on micro issues, and Fogel and North are economic historians (North's ideas are relevant to the big-picture issues of growth and development, so he's a partial exception, but only a partial one)," he wrote.

"The problem becomes clearer when I consider the names of those Nobelists who would be obvious candidates, including Kenneth Arrow, Joseph Stiglitz, James Mirrlees, Robert Solow and Amartya Sen. All of these economists have made extensive contributions to the theory of economic growth and development, and all have been keenly interested in environmental issues. Unfortunately for Lomborg, though, all except Mirrlees1 are strong supporters of action to mitigate global warming. Having looked at the absentees, I look back at the list of inclusions and note that the one thing they have in common is that they are all generally regarded as right-wing," he wrote. [5].

More recently, the conference approach has been amended to include a number of "opponents", who - as of March 28 - are yet to be announced. [6]

At the March press conference the deputy editor of The Economist, Clive Crook, was keen to hustle what he hoped would be the international significane of the event. "We hope that the meeting in Copenhagen will have global implications both academically and politically. Copenhagen Consensus is an outstanding, visionary idea and deserves global coverage," he wrote in a media statement. [7]

Lomborg told BBC Online that his expectation was that the conference would provide direction on funding priorities. "The world faces a series of serious problems such as pollution, hunger and disease. Which problem should be addressed first? … We all wish there was enough money to solve every problem. But there is a limit to how much money we have. Therefore politicians prioritise every day, but not always on the best basis. Copenhagen Consensus will provide a framework to allow us to prioritise sensibly," he told BBC Online. [8]

However, Lomborg has made abundantly clear that allocating resources to combatting climate change would be at a cost of what he points to as more important issues such as access to clean drinking water.[9]

"I'm not saying that this [climate change] is a question of me saying, "oh, it's going to be a little problem", I'm saying all of the models have looked at, what will be the costs and benefits. We should do something else. We can actually do a lot more good elsewhere," Lomborg said in one interview. [10]

In an editorial explaining the purpose of the conference, even The Economist itself seems resigned to the outcomes being ignored because of the narrowness of the panel. "And if the Copenhagen panel of experts does manage, despite these difficulties, to reach some kind of substantive agreement, there is little reason to suppose that politicians or the wider public will go along with a consensus reached among a group of economists, a tribe renowned in the wider world for its desiccated view of human welfare," The Economist wrote.

The Economist rather bizarrely - and with a touch of arrogance - foreshadows that if the conference outcomes are ignored it will simply confirm the superiority of the panel's intellectual analysis over the populist tendencies of the public and decision makers. "... The fact remains that governments already have very large aid budgets, which they apportion somehow among competing demands--doubtless paying more attention to the fluctuating pressures of press and television than any consistent or coherent method of analysis. Implicitly, their decisions already reflect underlying estimates of costs and benefits, but the process is arbitrary and closed to inspection. Even if the Copenhagen Consensus project does no more than force that fact to be acknowledged, it will have been worth the trouble," the Economist forlornly concludes. [11]

Sponsors

According to the conference website the sponsors are

  • The Tuborg Foundation and The Carlsberg Bequest to the Memory of Brewer I.C. Jacobsen with 1,1 million Danish Kroner
  • The Ministry of the Environment with 2 million Danish Kroner.
  • The Economist magazine [12]

Panel of Experts

Challenge Paper authors

"Opponents"

Lomborg has foreshadowed that the conference will include a number of as yet unspecified "opponents". [13]

Contact information

Director Bjorn Lomborg
Ph 45 7226 5800
Project Manager Henrik Meyer
Phone: 45 7226 5820
Web: http://www.copenhagenconsensus.com

External links

Retrieved from "https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Copenhagen_Consensus&oldid=29887"

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