Bjorn Lomborg
Bjorn Lomborg
Bjørn Lomborgis a Danish author and adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School as well as President of the Copenhagen Consensus Center. He is former director of the Danish government's Environmental Assessment Institutein Copenhagen. He became internationally known for his best-selling and controversial book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, in which he argues that many of the costly measures and actions adopted by scientists and policy makers to meet the challenges of global warming will ultimately have minimal impact on the world’s...
NationalityDanish
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth6 January 1965
CountryDenmark
Money spent on carbon cuts is money we can't use for effective investments in food aid, micronutrients, HIV/AIDS prevention, health and education infrastructure, and clean water and sanitation.
We need to invest dramatically in green energy, making solar panels so cheap that everybody wants them. Nobody wanted to buy a computer in 1950, but once they got cheap, everyone bought them.
The second thing is, if you want to do something about global warming, you have to think much more long-term. There is something wrong with saying we should start using renewables now, while they are still incredibly expensive.
My suggestion is that we should first work to ensure the Third World has clean drinking water and sanitation.
In the same way, we have to investigate the solar mechanism, but right now, the IPC claims that it's probably not the main cause.
Even if every major government were to slap huge taxes on carbon fuels - which is not going to happen - it wouldn't do much to halt climate change any time soon. What it would do is cost us hundreds of billions - if not trillions - of dollars, because alternative energy technologies are not yet ready to take up the slack.
A review was published in Nature, very scathing, essentially calling me incompetent, though they didn't use that word. I am putting a reply on my Web site in a few days, where I go through their arguments, paragraph by paragraph.
I think Al Gore has done a great service in making global warming cool. He's basically taken it from a nerdy, almost ignored issue to making it what it is - namely, a problem.
Even if I was a bad right wing guy, to the extent of whether my arguments are right or wrong, they're right or wrong independently if I'm right or left.
We worry about the seemingly ever-increasing number of natural catastrophes. Yet this is mainly a consequence of CNN - we see many more, but the number is roughly constant, and we manage to deal much better with them over time. Globally, the death rate from catastrophes has dropped about fifty-fold over the past century.
...children born today-in both the industrialized world and developing countries-will live longer and be healthier, they will get more food, a better education, a higher standard of living, more leisure time and far more possibilities-without the global environment being destroyed.
If every country committed to spending 0.05 per cent of GDP on researching non-carbon-emitting energy technologies, that would cost $25 billion a year, and it would do a lot more than massive carbon cuts to fight warming and save lives.
Of course, the world is full of problems. But on the other hand it's important to get the sense... are we generally moving in the right direction or the wrong direction?
We have to be aware that the scientific community throws up tons of different hypotheses and at a certain point we'll find out who was right and who was wrong. But we have to go with the best information right now, which I would claim to be the IPCC reports.