Bjorn Lomborg Quotes

Only when we get sufficiently rich can we afford the relative luxury of caring about the environment.

When a company (e.g. Enron) is calling for more environmental regulation, we need to look very carefully at what they might stand to gain from it… I don’t believe that there is some kind of grand conspiracy to promote scare stories about environmental crisis. I do believe that companies, the media, and politicians benefit from those stories. This confluence of interests goes a long way to explaining why the conversation surrounding climate change has become so detached from scientific reality.

Cold homes are one of the leading causes of deaths in winter… A climate policy reversing the price reduction due to fracking will drive energy prices back up. People will be less able to heat their homes, and the consequent death rate will go back up.

What matters most is that we make sure that the most vulnerable, worst-off people living in shantytowns are lifted out of poverty. It is growth, not carbon dioxide reductions, that will prevent the harrowing losses that the world’s poorest endure as a result of hurricanes.

Climate policies often make life WORSE specifically for the poor...Choosing climate policies over growth policies doesn’t just do nothing. It means more people die avoidable deaths… Lifting incomes significantly reduces the damage from any potential climate-change-caused increase in hurricanes, droughts, and floods...A comprehensive study...shows that strong global action to reduce climate change would cause far more hunger and food insecurity than climate change itself.

The science shows us that fears of a climate apocalypse are unfounded. Global warming is real, but it is not the end of the world. It is a manageable problem. Yet, we now live in a world where almost half the population believes climate change will extinguish humanity. This has profoundly altered the political reality. It makes us double down on poor climate policies. It makes us increasingly ignore all other challenges, from pandemics and food shortages to political strife and conflicts, or subsume them under the banner of climate change… If we don’t say stop, the current, false climate alarm, despite its good intentions, is likely to leave the world much worse off than it could be… We need to dial back on the panic, look at the science, face the economics, and address the issue rationally.

One of the loudest voices calling for greater focus is Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish economist, who has launched the Post-2015 Consensus, an effort to draw up a shortish list of goals and targets the benefits of which, if achieved, would far outweigh the costs. This is a souped-up version of the Copenhagen Consensus he has run for the past decade, bringing together leading economists to calculate the cheapest ways to improve the state of the world.

Emissions of carbon dioxide are largely by-products of productivity-- of industry, governments, and individuals producing things that we want more of (including heating, cooling, food, transport, hospital care, and so much more)..When countries promise to reduce their emissions, they are effectively promising to make all these things a touch more expensive. That acts as a slight brake on the economy, leading to a small reduction in growth… “This cost is the relevant social cost of climate policies-- the reduction in welfare that comes from each nation insisting on using energy that is slightly more costly and less reliable than fossil fuels.” -p. 112

Danish statistician, Bjorn Lomborg, who wrote a book called The Skeptical Environmentalist.

The negative impacts (of biofuels) were much greater than most had anticipated...the amount of crops needed to fill an SUV’s fuel tank with biofuel would feed a child for an entire year, and every gallon of biofuel wiped out forty meals… “A srong climate campaigner called the subsidies driving the biofuel industry’s growth ‘a crime against humanity.’ Yet, vested agricultural interests had made the bad policies almost impossible to overturn. It seems that we have learned little from recent history, as we plow headlong into new policies that will similarly hurt the world’s poor.

The Paris Agreement will have no perceptible impact on malaria because it will lead to such small temperature changes; in fact, it is very likely that its total impact will actually lead to MORE malaria deaths...because (the climate policies) delay the time when nations get rich enough to see the final eradication of malaria.” -p. 142

Biomass, which basically is a fancy-sounding name for wood, is one of the old, reliable renewables that can produce energy when it is needed. The problem for the planet is that wood is often imported from US forests in diesel-driven ships, and emits MORE carbon dioxide than even coal when it is burned. Biomass is categorized by the EU only as carbon dioxide free because it is hoped that felled trees will be replanted and over many future decades will soak up as much carbon dioxide as was released by its burning. Needless to say, this is dubious accounting at best.” -p. 108

One of the great ironies of climate change activism today is that many of the movement’s most vocal proponents are also horrified by global income inequality. They are blind, however, to the fact that the costs of the policies they demand will be borne disproportionately by the world’s poorest. This is because so much of climate change policy boils down to limiting access to cheap energy… “Countries in the developing world need cheap and reliable energy, for now mostly from fossil fuels, to promote industry and growth. Not surprisingly, a recent study of the consequences of implementing the Paris Agreement showed that it will actually increase poverty.

Global temperature and GDP are both rising, and each affects the other… We have to find the right balance between the two factors. If we focus solely on growing global GDP, we risk temperatures rising to such an extent that the negative impact on our well-being will more than offset the benefits brought about by extra growth. Yet, if we try to cut as much carbon dioxide as we can, out of a sense of panic, we could easily end up reducing human well-being to a degree that far offsets any environmental benefits we achieve.” -p. 46

The Paris Agreement will cost a fortune to carry out and do almost no good… Every single major industrialized country is failing to live up to the promises it made under the Paris Agreement, and the few countries on track are too small to make any significant impact at all...Spending trillions to achieve almost nothing is, not surprisingly, a bad idea. Every dollar spent will produce climate benefits worth just 11 cents.” P. 111, 118, 123

The jarring fact is that humanity just finished spending two centuries GETTING RID OF renewable energy and replacing it with fossil fuels. When everyone was poor, the whole world cooked and kept warm using polluting renewable energy sources like wood and dung...In the poor world, replacing fossil fuels with new renewable energy sources like wind and solar power is hard because most people desperately want MUCH MORE power at lower cost, not fickle power at high cost.” -pp. 104-5

By making people richer, especially in the world’s poorest countries, freer trade would also lead to societies far more resilient to climate shocks, more capable of investing in adaptation, and far less vulnerable to rising temperatures. In that way, free trade can be considered a smart CLIMATE policy as well as an excellent way to promote human thriving generally.

We must rein in temperature increases and help ensure that the most vulnerable can adapt. But today’s popular climate change policies of rolling out solar panels and wind turbines have insidious effects: they push up energy costs, hurt the poor, cut emissions ineffectively, and put us on an unsustainable pathway where taxpayers are eventually likely to revolt. Instead, we need to invest in innovation, smart carbon taxes, R&D into geoengineering, and adaptation...Making the world richer is also important...The richer people are, the more resilient they will be in the face of global warming.

Adaptation is very effective at cooling cities, (e.g.) cool roofs and pavements… Adaptive actions can typically deliver much more protection much faster and at a lower cost than any realistic carbon-reduction climate policy.

A carbon tax forces you to take into account the climate disbenefits that your purchase is responsible for, so you can weigh these against the benefit… “It doesn’t just show consumers which products are carbon intensive and should be used more sparingly, but it helps energy producers move toward lower carbon dioxide emissions (perhaps through more reliance on solar and wind energy), and it encourages innovators to come up with new, lower-carbon processes and products.

Choosing expensive carbon-cutting policies or insisting on green development approaches might seem like an easy choice for the world’s elite in Washington, DC, or Paris, France, but the burden of these choices falls unfairly on the world’s poor, and especially on those living in abject poverty. They need more energy, not moralizing from the West. It is perverse to hear rich people piously claim that we should help the world’s poor by cutting carbon dioxide to make their future slightly less worse, when we have huge opportunities to make their lives much better, much more quickly, and much more effectively.

We should not confuse the rising costs of flooding with flooding itself (or indeed with climate change). It is entirely caused by more houses and more wealth; in fact, the cost compared to the US national income had declined almost tenfold. If we want to reduce this amount even more, the solution isn’t to be found in radically reducing carbon dioxide levels. The solution is to stop building lots of big, expensive houses in flood zones… “Any disaster today will cause more damage because there are more homes, factories, office buildings, and infrastructure to destroy.” -pp. 66, 74

We should be innovating tomorrow’s technologies rather than erecting today’s inefficient turbines and solar panels. We should explore fusion, fission, water splitting, ...algae grown on the ocean surface that produces oil… This is one more cost of the relentless alarmism. Since we’re so intent on doing something right now, even if it is almost trivial, we neglect to focus on the technological breakthroughs that in the long run could actually allow humanity to move away from fossil fuels.” -pp. 14, 15

Innovation has helped with problems in the past, e.g. whale oil use, horse manure in the streets, increasing grain yields. “When we innovate and find a cheap, technological solution, we solve major challenges and generate broadly shared benefits. We need to apply that lesson to the problem of climate change.

The expanding bull’s eye effect means we’re likely to see much more costly disasters happen over time, even if the climate doesn’t change at all… In reality, much (and often all) we’re seeing is that more people with more stuff live in harm’s way.” -p. 37 “We also need to stop believing that any story with climate in it is best solved through climate policies… Even if we went all-in and spent hundreds of trillions on climate policies, SEA LEVELS WOULD STILL RISE, ONLY SLIGHTLY LESS than if we did nothing. Millions would still get flooded. If we instead went all-in on adaptation, we could for less than a hundredth of the cost save almost everyone. The same with heat deaths; focusing on climate policies costs vastly more yet helps much, much less than air conditioning.” -p. 37

People are panicking about climate change in large part because the media and environmental campaigners tell us to, because politicians overhype the likely effects, and because scientific research is often communicated without crucial context…: humans adapt to their changing earth. They have for millenia… “We don’t just use up the iron or gas that is there and then give up. We get better at finding more, at lower cost, in effect allowing humanity access to ever more and ever cheaper resources… “Once the human propensity for adaptation is taken into account, the numbers on climate change start looking a lot less scary. And adaptation should ALWAYS be factored into any climate change study, because humans are ALWAYS adapting.” -p. 19, 29, 35