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  • Newsart for Hugging a Burning Tree

    Hugging a Burning Tree

    PRAGUE – We are all brought up to recycle paper to save trees. We get countless e-mail admonitions: “Please consider the environment before …

  • Newsart for Blinded by the Light

    Blinded by the Light

    NEW YORK – On the evening of March 23, 1.3 billion people will go without light at 8:30, and at 9:30, and at 10:30, and for the rest of the …

  • Newsart for A Golden Rice Opportunity

    A Golden Rice Opportunity

    SÃO PAULO – Finally, after 12 years of delay caused by opponents of genetically modified (GM) foods, so-called “golden rice” with vitamin A …

  • Newsart for The End of Pasta?

    The End of Pasta?

    PRAGUE – Scare stories have been an integral part of the global warming narrative for a long time. Back in 1997, Al Gore told us that global…

  • Newsart for A Tale of Two Treaties

    A Tale of Two Treaties

    PRAGUE – The Doha meeting continued 20 years of failed climate negotiations, since the original Earth Summit in Rio in 1992. There, countrie…

  • Newsart for The Moral of Sandy

    The Moral of Sandy

    COPENHAGEN – When “superstorm” Sandy hit the east coast of the United States on October 29, it not only flooded the New York City Subway and…

  • Newsart for Scary Pictures

    Scary Pictures

    PRAGUE – Campaigners on important but complex issues, annoyed by the length of time required for public deliberations, often react by exagge…

  • Newsart for A Fracking Good Story

    A Fracking Good Story

    PRAGUE – Weather conditions around the world this summer have provided ample fodder for the global warming debate. Droughts and heat waves a…

  • Newsart for Like Water for Climate

    Like Water for Climate

    MALMÖ – “Everyone knows” that you should drink eight glasses of water a day. After all, this is the advice of a multitude of health writers,…

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Bjorn Lomborg: Global Warning

Should addressing climate change be the leading global priority? Can economic growth and environmental protection be reconciled? Who should pay the costs of pollution: Consumers? Big business? Government? Can we really feed the world on organically grown food?

What to do about the environment, particularly global warming, is the most incendiary issue of our time. Scientists, economists, politicians – indeed anyone interested in the future of the planet – have joined the fray.

Environmental debates are charged by the belief on one side that life is under threat, and the conviction on the other that doomsayers are conspiring to spend taxpayers’ money on a phantom. The debates are also inflamed by a moral angle: the sense, at the heart of the environmental movement, that individual selfishness will lead us to a new apocalypse.

Environmental ignorance and fear have spawned both a new politics and a new industry. Governments, international bureaucracies, and universities employ thousands of people to figure out what is going on, while big corporations now have high-level teams of advisers to find out what scientists think and what politicians are planning to do.

Although environmental science remains uncertain, debates about it need not be incoherent. That is why Project Syndicate asked Bjørn Lomborg, a man Time magazine calls "one of the seminal thinkers of our time," to make sense of the basic political, economic, and moral questions that surround the problem of environmental sustainability.

Bjørn Lomborg is the founder of the Copenhagen Consensus, which has put the best analytical principles and minds to work on environmental problems. His monthly series, Global Warning, provided exclusively by Project Syndicate to its member papers, breaks through the cant and confusion to discover what our priorities should be, and how we should address them.

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Bjørn Lomborg

Bjørn Lomborg, an adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School, founded and directs the Copenhagen Consensus Center, which seeks to study environmental problems and solutions using the best available analytical methods. He is the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It, the basis of an eponymous documentary film.

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