There is just one factor that keeps increasing: our carbon emissions. It is not at all obvious to anybody how to convert carbon dioxide to area. The WWF and some researchers choose to get around this by defining the area of emissions as the area of forest needed to soak up the extra carbon dioxide. This now makes up more than 50 percent of the ecological footprint, and will grow to three-quarters before mid-century.
In essence, we are being told that we ought to cut emissions to zero, and to plant trees to achieve that, meaning that we would have to plant forests today on 30 percent more than all of the available land, and plant forests on almost two planets by 2030. This is unreasonable.
NECESSARY?
Is it really necessary for us to cut all emissions? Just cutting about half of all emissions would reduce greenhouse gas concentrations in the medium term. More importantly, planting forests is one of the least area-efficient technology-intensive ways to cut carbon. Solar cells and wind turbines require less than 1 percent of the area of forests to reduce carbon dioxide, they increase in efficiency, and they can often be placed on non-productive land (such as wind turbines at sea and solar panels in deserts). Measured this way, the scary eco-crunch disappears.
Due to technology, the individual demand on the planet has already dropped 35 percent over the past half-decade, and the collective requirement will reach its upper limit before 2020 without any overdraft.
Translating carbon dioxide into an illogical and inefficient measure of forest cover seems intended mainly to ensure that an alarming message results.
In the scientific literature, a leading modeler acknowledges that most modelers regard this method as “hard to defend.” Two other research teams have pointed out that the ecological footprint “itself is nothing more than an important attention-grabbing device,” and that “it is less a scientific measure than one designed to raise public awareness and influence politics.”
When we really examine the “ecological footprint” calculations, we discover that the only thing the world is running out of is space to plant a colossal amount of imaginary forest that we wouldn’t have planted anyway — to avoid carbon dioxide emissions that we can prevent through much smarter and cheaper means.
That our profligate consumption requires five planets is a catchy story, but it is wrong. The planet we have is more than enough.
Bjorn Lomborg, the director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, is an adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School and author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming.
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