看到台灣廣告湯瑪斯佛里曼最新出版著作《世界又熱又平又擠》，剛好上週五華爾街日報有書評，轉貼分享。

基本上來說，華爾街日報是較保守的報紙，看書評時要有這一警惕。

儘管如此，大體看來，覺得書評還算中肯。尤其是最後的總結。

我發現台灣賣美國流行書時，報喜不報憂，通常不提供全面性的書評。無可厚非，行銷賣書嘛。我不能建議以WSJ的書評來選書，但是覺得應該提供不同的看法。

至於我嘛。上週我還聽到作者被採訪，談本書。聽聽意見，覺得不錯，但應該不會買來或借來閱讀。

註：以下摘於華爾街日報，純屬個人使用。若有侵權，隨時下架。

A Chilling View of Warming

Climate change prompts a call to arms. But at what cost would the battle be waged?

By BJØRN LOMBORG
September 13, 2008; Page W13

Hot, Flat, and Crowded
By Thomas L. Friedman
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 438 pages, $27.95)

In his latest dispatch on the state of the world, "Hot, Flat, and Crowded," Thomas L. Friedman makes it clear that he wants to improve conditions for mankind. "I start from the bedrock principle," he writes, "that we as a global society need more and more growth." But because of climate change (hot), ever-more people (crowded) and higher material aspirations of all in a competitive global economy (flat), he believes that the world's growth is leading us toward catastrophe.

In June 2004, I was visiting London with my daughter Orly, and one evening we went to see the play Billy Elliot at a theater near Victoria Station. During intermission, I was standing up, stretching my legs in the aisle next to my seat, when a stranger approached and asked me, "Are you Mr. Friedman?" Read an excerpt from "Hot, Flat and Crowded."¹

Mr. Friedman, a columnist for the New York Times, describes this threat in the grimmest of terms. We should expect disasters "of a biblical scale," humans are an "endangered species" and none of us "are going to make it." Climate change is presented as a "survival issue" that "will undermine the quality of life for every person on this planet and eventually imperil life on earth itself." Our planet is the Titanic that has already hit the iceberg, "but some people just don't want to leave the dance floor."

Relentlessly, Mr. Friedman spins toward an extreme answer: We desperately need a green revolution involving a rapid reduction in CO2 emissions. This will leave a better planet for our children and for the Third World. It will mean that our oil money won't support the world's petrodictators, and America will get its groove back.

Let's be clear. Global warming is real and man-made. I take as my starting point the findings of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Denying climate science is foolish. But so is denying climate economics, the costs of which could run into the hundreds of trillions of dollars. Depressingly, Mr. Friedman throughout "Hot, Flat, and Crowded" simply does not talk seriously about the costs of his proposed solutions. He also fails to weigh those costs against the benefits, and he doesn't consider the threat of global warming in the context of other significant threats to the world's well-being.

For Mr. Friedman, our predicament is worse than the IPCC's worst-case projections. He showcases the familiar melting of arctic ice (which is indeed vanishing faster than models envisioned), but he ignores the Antarctic, where the sea ice is melting a lot slower than expected.

Mr. Friedman believes that the potential for climate disaster is significant. His nifty metaphor: We think that we're throwing two dice that go from two to 12, with double ones resulting in no climate change and double sixes being "wild, crazy" Al Gore-type predictions. Mr. Friedman warns that in real life the dice may come up "sixty." In essence, he's trumping Mr. Gore five-fold, coming to claim that sea levels might rise a hundred feet, whereas the U.N. expects between six inches and two feet this century. Yet the thousands of IPCC scientists do the math precisely so that authors don't just use whatever figures fit their argument.

Mr. Friedman is a smart guy, and he has interviewed a lot of interesting people for "Hot, Flat, and Crowded." The problem is that they are essentially all on the same side of the issue. His sources are mostly climate campaigners, politicians who've made climate a big issue and businessmen who would gain a lot from regulation. Not surprisingly, they fundamentally agree on the size of the problem and its solutions. None of Mr. Friedman's interview subjects mentions that the global sea-level rise has remained steady since satellite measurements began, pointing toward an increase of one foot by the end of the century. Over the past two years, in fact, sea levels have probably slightly dropped.

In Mr. Friedman's view, climate will become so important that CEOs will effectively become Chief Energy Officers. And forget about war, politics and celebrity gossip: "In 2030 the evening news is going to feature 'weather, other news and sports.' " Coming from someone in the news business, that's just bizarre. In 22 years -- when according to most responsible projections sea levels will have risen fewer than three inches -- all we'll talk about is global warming? Not likely.

Given the book's over-hyped rhetoric, it's no surprise that Mr. Friedman concludes that we should move hastily to cut CO2 levels. He wavers, though, between suggesting that this will be a daunting task and that it will be a walk in the park. At first he claims that the effort will be "the biggest single peacetime project humankind will have ever undertaken," but a little later says it is "affordable" with wind and solar technology "already cost-effective today." Energy solutions are so simple and cheap, he says, that there is "all this money lying all over the floor," and we just have to decide to pick it up. Yet he admits that keeping emissions stable at today's levels until 2050 would require, for example, building 13,000 new nuclear reactors around the world -- or roughly one new nuclear reactor every day for the next four decades.

That Mr. Friedman gets right is that global warming presents us with a challenge to respond with innovation. "If you take only one thing away form this book, please take this: we are not going to regulate our way our of the problems . . . we can only innovate our way out." With the technology that exists today, even small cuts in CO2 emissions are purchased at great cost, which means that developed countries will take small steps just for show (rich people will put inefficient solar panels on their roof-tops) while developing countries will do nothing. We need dramatic investment in new energy R&D, which will make renewables competitive faster. Mr. Friedman himself suggests that just $1 billion to $2 billion of R&D investment could make an enormous difference.

But after getting this right, he strangely demands invasive regulation through cap-and-trade, taxes, incentives, laws and subsidies: "We need to create demand, huge demand -- crazy, wild, off-the-charts demand -- for existing clean power technologies." Why on Earth would we want to buy huge amounts of inefficient technology? Why should we lock ourselves into an inefficient future? Mr. Friedman talks to business people like General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt, who naturally would welcome massive state subsidies for renewable energy projects. Every industry would love such government support -- but that doesn't make it good for society.

Although Mr. Friedman seems to favor a carbon tax, he doesn't ever say what level it should be. The most comprehensive economic meta-study indicates that climate impacts justify a tax of about six cents per gallon of gas. He endorses a gas tax of $5-$10 per gallon. That's wildly higher than the justifiable amount -- as well as far exceeding what even Mr. Gore has suggested. Economic estimates of such a general carbon tax would lie beyond $100 trillion, even if smartly implemented.

But R&D is both much less costly and a much better investment. Why? Think back to early computers of the 1950s: The only way to make them better was to massively invest in public R&D, which governments did. Demand only took off in the 1980s, when computing became so cheap that it provided more good than it cost. In Mr. Friedman's world, we should have all been forced to purchase expensive early computers in the 1950s, which of course would have been great for the producer but catastrophically expensive and leaving us with dramatically inefficient technology.

Mr. Friedman talks about renewables as the solution to the point of neglecting virtually everything else. Yes, we might be able to wean ourselves away from fossil fuels and deprive petrodictators of our riches many decades down the road. But if, say, Europe wanted real energy security now to protect itself from the mischief of Vladimir Putin, security could be had faster and cheaper by emphasizing the use of coal and focusing on renewable R&D. Instead, the Kyoto treaty has prompted much of Europe to move away from coal and toward gas -- and into the thrall of Russia's pipelines.

Mr. Friedman sympathetically talks about poor people who don't have access to electricity (although he incorrectly claims there are more and more of such people, when indeed the numbers have declined since the mid-1980s, from more than two billion to 1.6 billion today). He wants to help these people by giving them solar panels, and he describes with awe the places where lives have improved dramatically with solar power. Yet the International Energy Agency estimates for India that the investment cost for solar power is 14 times more expensive than diesel. If we really care for people without electrical power, shouldn't we use our resources so that 14 kids get power instead of just one?

Underlying Mr. Friedman's argument is a deep consideration for the world's poorest people. He talks about how global warming will dramatically add to the many burdens of the poor, including disease and hunger -- global warming, in a sense, is the straw that will break the camel's back. But instead of focusing on removing this single straw at extreme cost, maybe we should remove some of the great loads from the camel's back at much lower cost. In other words, if we want to help real people, let's tackle malaria, famine, the lack of clean water directly. It is a shame Mr. Friedman ended up selecting the worst solution to the least solvable challenge.

Because Mr. Friedman single-mindedly focuses on climate as the problem and massive renewable energy subsidies as the solution, he misses the policies that will make this world much better. In a sense, his prediction of the news being "weather, other news and sports" is a scary dystopia that would result if we followed his book to the letter -- if we made climate subsume every other issue. Although he briefly mentions the need to tackle health care, crumbling infrastructure, immigration reform, Social Security and Medicare, his proposal to spend trillions on global warming means that trillions can't be spent on other of the world's ills.

Toward the end of "Hot, Flat, and Crowded," Mr. Friedman wonders why we can't just implement the sort of policies he prefers. "What is our problem? If the right things to do are so obvious to the people who know the most about the energy business, why can't we put them in place?" Maybe the reason is that most people recognize a bad deal when they see one.

He cynically seems to suggest that it would help "if a few more Hurricane Katrinas hit a few more cities." Incredibly, he even flirts with the need for a dictatorship: "If only America could be China for a day," where we could cut through special interests, bureaucratic obstacles and worries of a voter backlash and simply "order top-down, the sweeping changes" needed.

I'm sure that such longing is testimony to his deep frustration with the debate. But, more important, it points to the failure of his book to　make a well-reasoned case for his proposals. While occasionally interesting,　"Hot, Flat, and crowded" remains a one-sided plea for an incorrect analysis.

Mr. Lomborg is the author of "Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming" (Knopf, 2007).

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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122126316904030487.html