Climate engineering projects more effective than increasing taxes

"Climate engineering" projects, such as spraying seawater into the sky to dim sunlight, would be a more effective brake on global warming than increasing taxes on energy, a group of economists said yesterday.

Led by Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish statistician and author of The Sceptical Environmentalist, a book which questioned orthodox environmental views, the group ranked "cloud whitening" as a top option in combating climate change.

"Climate engineering could provide a cheap, rapid and effective response to global warming," the economists said.

Mr Lomborg's panel ranked research into "marine cloud whitening technology" - having boats spray seawater droplets into the sky to create clouds - as the best of 21 ideas reviewed.

They ranked more research into clean energy such as solar and wind power second, ahead of research into spewing tiny dust-like particles high into the atmosphere to block sunlight and research into burying greenhouse gases. Among the least promising solutions, the group said that: "carbon taxes would be an expensive, ineffective way to reduce the suffering from global warming."

Many governments favour schemes that would place a price on carbon emissions, which would mean higher energy taxes.

"We should look at climate engineering as a fix for the first 50 to 100 years," said Mr Lomborg, meant as alternative advice to governments working on a new UN climate Treaty due to be agreed in Copenhagen in December.

"Research into green energy is what is going to fix the climate in the long-term," he added.

Earlier this week, Britain's main science academy, the Royal Society, recommended more research into climate engineering as an insurance policy but said it was not an alternative to cuts in emissions of greenhouse gases. And the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the scientific group that advises the UN, concluded in a 2007 report that technologies such as blocking sunlight "remain largely speculative and unproven, and with the risks of unknown side-effects".

"We found that climate engineering has great promise," Thomas Schelling, a Nobel Prize-winning US economist who was in Mr Lomborg's group, said in a statement.