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Risk, Science, and Public Policy:
Setting Social and Environmental Priorities
Tuesday, October 12, 2004 |
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We all wish that there were money enough to solve all of the world’s pressing social and environmental problems: HIV and malaria kill tens of millions of people each year; eight hundred million people are malnourished or starving; billions lack proper sewerage; and by some accounts, climate change may threaten the future of the planet. But means are limited. What should be the world’s humanitarian priorities?
In 2001, in The Skeptical Environmentalist, Bjørn Lomborg challenged the establishment view that the environment is deteriorating. Again questioning the status quo, Professor Lomborg recently assembled several distinguished economists to explore how the developed world might most effectively marshal its resources to address social and environmental problems. The Copenhagen Consensus, as it was called, is sparking an international debate over global priorities. This conference will critically review the Copenhagen Consensus in anticipation of the publication of its findings in Global Crises, Global Solutions.
To register, or for more information, please click here.
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AGENDA
Wednesday, October 12, 2004
9:00 a.m.–12:15 p.m.
St. Regis Hotel, Mount Vernon Room
923 Sixteenth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036
8:45 a.m. Registration
9:00 a.m. Welcome
ROBERT W. HAHN, AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies
Lecture
JOHN D. GRAHAM, Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs The Copenhagen Consensus
9:45 a.m. Welcome
JON ENTINE, AEI and Miami University
Lecture Bjørn LOMBORG, University of Aarhus, Denmark
10:45 a.m. Discussion
ROGER BATE, AEI William R. Cline, Institute for International Economics
THOMAS C. SCHELLING, University of Maryland
Moderator
Robert W. Hahn, AEI-Brookings Joint Center
12:15 p.m. Adjournment |
BIOGRAPHIES
Roger Bate is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a fellow at the International Policy Network and the Institute of Economic Affairs. He founded and was director of the Institute of Economic Affairs in London from 1993 to 2003 and cofounder and director of the European Science and Environment Forum from 1995 to 2001. He has written or edited numerous books and articles, including Global Warming: Apocalypse or Hot Air? IEA Studies on the Environment (Coronet Books, 1884); Fearing Food: Risk, Health and Environment (Butterworth-Heinemann, 1999); and What Risk? (Butterworth-Heinneman, 1997).
William R. Cline is a senior fellow jointly at the Institute for International Economics, which he joined at its inception in 1981, and the Center for Global Development in Washington. From 1996 to 2001, William Cline was deputy managing director and chief economist of the Institute of International Finance (IIF) in Washington, which conducts research on emerging-market economies for hundreds of financial institutions. Previously he was a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution (1973 to 1981) and deputy director of development and trade research at the office of the assistant secretary for international affairs at the US Treasury Department (1971 to 1973). His publications include: World Inflation and the Developing Countries (Brookings Institution Press, 1980); International Debt: Systemic Risk and Policy Responses (MIT Press, 1984); The Economics of Global Warming (IIE Press, 1992); and Trade and Income Distribution (IIE Press, 1997).
Jon H. Entine is an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and scholar in residence at Miami University (Ohio). He writes on genetics, economics, and public policy for academic and popular publications and writes a regular column, “The Ethical Edge,” for the London magazine Ethical Corporation. His books include Let Them Eat Precaution: Behind the Agricultural Biotechnology Debate (AEI Press, 2004); Abraham's Children: How Genetics is Unlocking the Hidden History of the Bible and the Shared Ancestry of Jews and Christians (Spring 2005); and Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We are Afraid to Talk About It (PublicAffairs, 2000). He previously wrote and produced news reports and documentaries for ABC, CBS, and NBC News.
John D. Graham is an administrator for the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs at the Office of Management and Budget, which serves as the nation’s regulatory gatekeeper on health, safety, and environmental standards. Before joining the Bush Administration, Dr. Graham founded and led the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis from 1990 to 2001. John Graham is on leave from the faculty of the Harvard School of Public Health, where he taught methods of risk and cost-benefit analysis. He is best known for his scholarship on automotive safety and environmental policy. His books include The Greening of Industry: A Risk Management Approach (Harvard University Press, 1997); Risk versus Risk: Tradeoffs in Protecting Health and the Environment (Harvard University Press, 1995); and Harnessing Science for Environmental Regulation (Praeger, 1991).
Robert W. Hahn is the co-founder and executive director of the AEI-Brookings Joint Center, and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He also served as a senior staff member of the President's Council of Economic Advisers for two years. Mr. Hahn has written numerous articles and frequently contributes to general-interest periodicals and leading scholarly journals, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the American Economic Review, the Journal of Economic Perspectives, and the Yale Law Journal. He has served as a consultant to government and industry on a variety of issues involving regulation and privatization. Most recently, he is the author of Reviving Regulatory Reform: A Global Perspective (AEI Press, 2000) and In Defense of the Economic Analysis of Regulation (AEI-Brookings Joint Center, 2004, forthcoming).
Bjørn Lomborg, an associate professor of statistics in the Department of Political Science at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, was recently named one of the world’s 100 most influential people by Time magazine. In 1998 he published four lengthy articles about the state of our environment in the leading Danish newspaper, which resulted in a firestorm debate spanning over 400 articles in major metropolitan newspapers. The articles lead to the publication of The Skeptical Environmentalist in 2001, which has now been published in more than ten languages. He subsequently took a leave from the University of Aarhus to start-up the Danish government’s Environmental Assessment Institute.
Thomas C. Schelling is a University of Maryland Distinguished University Professor and professor of economics emeritus at Harvard University. He spent 1948 to 1953 in Europe and Washington with the Marshall Plan. He subsequently taught at Yale University and Harvard University before joining Maryland in 1990. He is a distinguished fellow of the American Economic Association and was its president in 1991. His research interests have included arms control, energy and environmental policy, climate change, nuclear proliferation, international economics, and ethical issues in policy and in business. His publications include: The Strategy of Conflict (Harvard University Press, 1960); Arms and Influence (Yale University Press, 1966); Micromotives and Macrobehavior (Norton, 1978); and Choice and Consequence (Harvard University Press, 1984).
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CONFERENCE SUMMARY
Risk, Science, and Public Policy: Setting Social and Environmental Priorities
On October 12, 2004, the AEI-Brookings Joint Center hosted a conference on prioritizing global humanitarian challenges. In May 2004, Bjørn Lomborg organized the Copenhagen Consensus, a comprehensive study by a team of distinguished economists that was designed to determine which social and environmental problems could be solved most effectively with the world’s limited resources. Panelists reviewed the results of the Copenhagen Consensus in anticipation of the publication of its findings in Global Crises, Global Solutions.
How does the world community approach the multitude of existing social and environmental problems and decide where to focus its efforts? Which challenges can be solved most cost-effectively and which methods should be implemented to solve them? What does the Copenhagen Consensus contribute to the broad debate on global priorities, and what are its possible shortcomings?
John D. Graham, Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OMB)
Dr. Graham gave an introductory overview to different approaches to environmental and other regulatory problems, focusing on the contrast between the European Union’s reliance on the precautionary principle and the United States’ opposing view. Dr. Graham noted that the precautionary principle is not a single, well-defined principle but more of a general tendency to regulate strictly against potential hazards whose effects are not well known. He emphasized that incorporating precaution into policy is valuable, and that the U.S. government frequently does so, but that the need for preventative regulation must be well supported by scientific evidence. He argued that being overly cautious can lead to regulation of products and phenomena that turn out to be less harmful than initially believed, ultimately harming consumers by increasing costs to businesses and creating unnecessary trade barriers. Finally, Dr. Graham expressed encouragement that the United States and the E.U. are finding some common ground. He cited European court cases that have struck down the precautionary principle as a basis for regulation without sufficient empirical evidence and U.S. efforts to quantify uncertainty in cost-benefit analysis as examples of movement toward a reasonable, unified treatment of precaution in policymaking.
Bjørn Lomborg Department of Political Science, University of Aarhus in Denmark
Professor Lomborg, the coordinator of the Copenhagen Consensus, spoke about the purpose and design of the project, its results, and its broader implications for global policy. He started by criticizing the widespread lack of acknowledgement that prioritizing global challenges is necessary, noting that resources are limited and that trying to solve every problem simultaneously is inefficient and ends up not solving any problem well. He explained that the goal of the Copenhagen Consensus was for a team of economists to decide how $50 billion in global aid over a four-year period could receive maximum returns or alleviate the most possible suffering. After filtering through the relevant research and consulting with various experts in each field, the “dream team” formulated a list of seventeen proposed solutions to environmental and social challenges, in order of how cost-effectively they could be surmounted. At the bottom of the list was climate change, as addressing it was expected to have the lowest return among all of the problems considered. At the top of the list, with the highest expected payoffs, were treatment of diseases such as HIV/AIDS and malaria, reducing malnutrition by distributing micro-nutrients, and improved economic development through lower international trade barriers. Professor Lomborg stressed that beyond the results, two important goals of the project were increasing dialogue about prioritization and identifying which problems can and cannot be solved effectively using available methods. He hopes to repeat the Consensus every four years and is optimistic about the positive impact it will continue to have on improving solutions to global humanitarian challenges.
Roger Bate, AEI
Dr. Bate agreed that treating HIV/AIDS should be among the top global humanitarian priorities, and he added water sanitation as an issue of top concern. For each of these areas, Dr. Bate identified some of the major shortcomings of current solution methods and offered alternatives that he believed would be more successful. He argued that the private sector has much to offer in terms of innovation and diversity of problem-solving, and that leaving them out of global aid projects to the extent they are now is significantly counterproductive to achieving humanitarian goals, even if there is agreement on which ones to pursue.
William R. Cline, Institute for International Economics, Center for Global Development
Dr. Cline expressed disappointment with and objected to the low priority that the Copenhagen Consensus assigned to climate change. Dr. Cline cited a model he had constructed in a recent paper to argue that regulation of global warming-causing agents was justified on economic grounds. He took issue with what he called a false dilemma rooted in the time and resource constraints set in the Copenhagen exercise. The relatively small amount of resources and short time-frame to deal with problems naturally favored challenges that could be addressed and measured more immediately, rather than challenges with longer time-horizons but potentially larger economic impacts, like climate change. He was concerned that by labeling climate change a “bad” investment, the project would be used to justify inattention to climate problems. He also pointed out that many proposed solutions to climate change, such as taxes of various types, are revenue-raising rather than revenue-depleting, and thus determining returns on aid spent may not be an appropriate way to measure their impact.
Thomas C. Schelling, University of Maryland, Harvard University
Professor Schelling argued that the best means of combating climate change is to facilitate economic development, rather than simply dedicating resources to abatement, which he viewed as an inefficient welfare transfer from developed to undeveloped countries. He largely agreed with the conclusion of the Copenhagen Consensus that challenges in which the most effective and most immediate relief could be provided should be addressed first, and that disease, malnutrition, and economic development best fit this criteria. He suggested temporary compensation for the removal of duties as one possible way to use aid to advance freer trade. Finally, he recommended for the next Consensus an increased focus on the interrelatedness of various global challenges and consideration of synergies across domains in solution design.
AEI-Brookings Joint Center research assistant Jesse Gurman prepared this summary. | |
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