Bjørn Lomborg
Bjørn Lomborg is the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It, head of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, and adjunct professor at Copenhagen Business School.
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2010-07-14
| The dominant approach to addressing climate change – subsidizing inefficient technologies or making fossil fuels too expensive to use - cannot possibly achieve the goal of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions by 50% by mid-century. Instead, we should fund the basic research that will make green energy too cheap and easy to resist.... read |
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2010-06-10
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At a time when their economies are sputtering, European leaders have embraced the bizarre idea of further reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions. There is a strong correlation between carbon emissions and GDP growth, so, in the absence of alternatives to fossil fuels, Europeans are, in effect, calling for a deeper recession. ... read |
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2010-05-13
| In February, 14 distinguished climate scientists, economists, and policy experts came together to discuss how to tackle global warming. The group’s report, “The Hartwell Paper,” outlines a new direction for climate policy after the collapse of last year’s attempts to negotiate a global climate deal.... read |
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2010-04-01
| At the stroke of 8:30 p.m. on Saturday, March 27, nearly a billion people in more than 120 countries demonstrated their desire to do something about global warming by switching off their lights for an hour. But the main thing that anyone accomplished by turning off the lights at nighttime for an hour was to make it harder to see. ... read |
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2010-03-12
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Why are we willing to calculate costs and benefits when it comes to addressing traffic safety and terrorism, but not when devising policies to deal with climate change? A constructive dialogue about the smartest policy responses to global warming requires replacing our fixation on far-fetched, Armageddon scenarios with realism about the true costs of confronting this challenge.... read |
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2010-02-12
| As George W. Bush and Tony Blair learned the hard way, the public does not take kindly to being misled about the nature of potential threats. A similar shift in global public opinion is occurring with respect to climate change, owing to a stream of revelations about climate scientists' sloppy, if not tendentious, practices.... read |
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2010-01-13
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Since the Copenhagen climate summit’s failure, many politicians and pundits have pointed the finger at China’s leaders for blocking a binding, global carbon-mitigation treaty. But the Chinese government’s resistance was both understandable and inevitable.... read |
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2009-12-11
| Spin always trumps substance at gatherings like the COP15 climate-change summit in Copenhagen. Consider how quick the delegates were to dismiss "Climategate," the scandal caused by the release of thousands of disturbing emails and other documents from a prestigious British climate-research center.... read |
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2009-11-16
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There is a dangerous misperception that willpower and political agreement are the only missing ingredients needed to combat global warming. In fact, there is also a colossal technological hurdle, because ending our reliance on fossil fuels requires a complete transformation of the world’s energy systems.... read |
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Global Warming’s Misunderstood Victims
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Bjørn Lomborg 
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Media organizations in wealthy countries regularly send forth reporters to find “victims of global warming.” But when we actually listen to local people who are said to be in danger, it turns out that they are worried about far more immediate problems.... read
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2006-09-05
| Cinemas everywhere will soon be showing former US Vice President Al Gore’s film on global warming. “An Inconvenient Truth” has received rave reviews in America and Europe, and it will most likely gain a large worldwide audience. But, while the film is full of emotion and provocative images, it is short on rational arguments. ... read |
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2005-02-10
| When the Kyoto treaty enters into force on February 16, the global warming community will undoubtedly congratulate itself: to do good they have secured the most expensive worldwide treaty ever. They have succeeded in making global warming a central moral test of our time. They were wrong to do so. ... read |
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2005-12-01
| Global warming has become the preeminent concern of our time. Many governments and most campaigners meeting in Montreal now through December 9 tell us that dealing with global warming should be our first priority. Negotiating a follow-up treaty to the Kyoto Protocol, they argue, requires that we seek even deeper cuts in the pollution that causes global warming.... read |
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2008-07-11
| Because of climate panic, our attempts to mitigate climate change have provoked an unmitigated disaster. We will waste hundreds of billions of dollars, worsen global warming, and dramatically increase starvation.... read |
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2007-09-12
| From global warming to the threat of terrorism, pesticides, and the loss of bio-diversity, the media pelt us with a constant barrage of one-sided warnings. We need to put all of these warnings in perspective, so that we can figure out which ones really should concern us, and when we should act on them.... read |
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2008-04-11
| The recent “lights out” campaign was intended to energize public opinion about the problems of climate change by urging citizens in 27 big cities to turn out their lights for an hour. But, as has become typical of environmental debates, no one pointed out that the event was immensely futile, and that it caused much higher overall pollution.... read |
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2008-05-12
| The EU's plan to reduce carbon emissions by 20% by 2020 will most likely cost at least €150 billion a year, yet it will postpone temperature increase due to global warming by just two years, from 2100 to 2102. For that money, we could provide clean drinking water, sanitation, education, and health care to everyone on the planet, while increasing CO2-reducing R&D ten-fold. ... read |
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2008-09-12
| One commonly repeated argument for doing something about climate change is based on comparing the cost of action with the cost of inaction. This argument sounds compelling, and almost every major politician in the world uses it, but it turns out to be entirely fallacious.... read |
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2008-03-11
| While the removal of trade and migration barriers would carry one-time costs, economic analysis shows that it would be an exceptionally wise investment for rich and poor countries alike. The real hurdle is getting this message across to politicians an voters.... read |
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McCain, Obama, and Hot Air
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Bjørn Lomborg
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Both John McCain and Barack Obama have promised tough action on global warming. But the cornerstone of their plans – a cap-and-trade system to reduce carbon emissions - is expensive, unwieldy, and would mainly benefit politicians and big businesses in privileged positions.... read
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Re-Thinking Counter-Terrorism
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Bjørn Lomborg and Todd Sandler
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Although rich countries' citizens regard terrorism as one of the world’s greatest threats, trans-national terrorists take, on average, just 420 lives each year. So, have the terrorists succeeded in getting the developed world to invest poorly in counterterrorism, while ignoring more pressing problems involving health, the environment, conflict, and governance?... read
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2010-07-14
