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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2012-01-10
| Dressing up failure as victory has been integral to climate-change negotiations since they started 20 years ago. The latest round of talks in Durban, South Africa in December were no exception.... read |
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2011-12-13
| Nowadays, no hurricane or heat wave passes without a politician or activist claiming it as evidence of the need for a global climate deal, like the one sought at the latest round of unsuccessful negotiations in Durban, South Africa. But such claims merit close scrutiny.... read |
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2011-11-14
| From political photo opportunities, to governments' environmental subsidies, it seems everyone these days wants to look green. But we do not burn fossil fuels simply to annoy environmentalists; we burn them because fossil fuels facilitate virtually all the material advances that civilization has achieved over the last few hundred years.... read |
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2011-10-14
| Funding from developed governments for efforts to combat HIV/AIDS is dropping – a trend that must be reversed. But we also need to acknowledge that billions of dollars have been spent on well-meaning attempts to save lives, with an alarming lack of high-quality evaluation of how these investments have performed.... read |
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2011-09-15
| HIV/AIDS remains a daily threat to millions, stunts development, and destroys far too many lives. With attention and financial support flagging, it is vital that we step up our fight against the disease by adding lessons from cost-benefit analysis to our arsenal.... read |
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2011-08-12
| Amid a growing wave of concern about climate change, many countries – including Brazil, Australia, the US, and EU members – passed laws in the 2000’s outlawing or severely restricting access to incandescent light bulbs. But the real problem, as ever, is that the new technology is not yet as attractive as the old.... read |
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2011-07-15
| Whenever opposite political forces attract, as activists and big business have in the case of global warming, there is a high risk that the public interest will be caught in the middle. That, in a nutshell, is the story of the rise of "renewable" energy.... read |
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2011-06-14
| The intention behind the UN's Millennium Development Goals was laudable, but 11 years on, progress in achieving them has been uneven. As decision-makers start to consider what our aspirations should be after the deadline has expired in 2015, it is worth looking back at what worked, what didn’t, and how we could do better.... read |
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2011-05-17
| In many Western countries, climate-change policies are increasingly being wrapped in promises of greater energy security. But the old, discredited policies look no better in their new packaging.... read |
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No Nukes?
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Bjørn Lomborg 
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The harsh reality highlighted by the Fukushima nuclear disaster – is that we do not yet have the luxury of dumping nuclear power. Until we can find a feasible alternative, doing so would mean greater reliance on fossil fuels, and thus higher carbon emissions and more fatalities than nuclear energy has ever caused.... 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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2008-09-12
| 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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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 |
2011-11-14
