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Bjorn Lomborg

Let’s focus on the smartest strategies to help the world

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This article submitted by Bjorn Lomborg of the Copenhagen Consensus Centre

Dr. Bjorn Lomborg researches the smartest ways to do good in the world and has repeatedly been named one of Foreign Policy’s top 100 public intellectuals. 

He is the author of several best-selling books, Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and he has worked with many hundreds of the world’s top economists, including seven Nobel Laureates.

Lomborg is a frequent commentator in print and broadcast media, for outlets including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Times of India and China Daily. His monthly columns are published in dozens of newspapers across all continents. 

The Copenhagen Consensus Center, was named Think Tank of the Year in International Affairs by Prospect Magazine. It has repeatedly been top-ranked by University of Pennsylvania in its global overview of think tanks.

Net-zero climate policy offers much pain, little gain

In rich countries, energy policies designed to make fossil fuels expensive are doing exactly what they were supposed to do. Since the 2015 Paris climate agreement, global fossil-fuel investment has halved, inevitably driving up prices.

Unfortunately, the painless transition to renewable energy sources that climate activists have promised has not happened: Renewables are far from ready to power the world. This has been a significant contributor to the current energy crisis, and despite energy scarcity, we’re not reining in carbon emissions.

Emerging economies that are focused on poverty eradication and economic development are unlikely to follow a net-zero approach that brings much pain for very little climate reward. India even wants the West to pay $1 trillion in climate finance just to start its transition.

Bjorn Lomborg writes in a new op-ed for New York Post(USA), National Post (Canada), The Australian, Addis Fortune (Ethiopia) and Tempi (Italy) that without affordable, effective fossil-fuel replacements, power bills will rise and growth will shrink. That’s why we need to focus on green energy innovation.

Electric car subsidies are a bad investment


Climate activists and politicians constantly tell us electric cars are cleaner, cheaper, and better. California and many countries, including the U.K., Germany, and Japan, will even prohibit the sale of new gas and diesel cars within a decade or two.

But if electric cars are really so good, why do we need to ban the alternatives? And why do we need to subsidize electric cars to the tune of $30 billion per year?

Lomborg writes in Newsweek that you can buy the same CO2 reduction an electric car offers compared to a gas car on America’s longest-established carbon trading system for about $300, making electric car subsidies one of the least effective and most expensive ways to cut emissions.

The world is getting better. We just don’t hear about it.

Not long ago, environmentalists constantly used pictures of polar bears to highlight the dangers of climate change. The bears even featured in Al Gore’s fear-inducing movie An Inconvenient Truth. But the reality is that polar bear numbers have been increasing – from 5,000-10,000 polar bears in the 1960s, up to around 26,000 today. We don’t hear this news. Instead, campaigners just quietly stopped using polar bears in their activism.

With a torrent of doom and gloom about climate change and the environment in the news, it’s understandable why many people — especially the young — genuinely believe the world is about to end. The fact is that while significant problems remain, many indicators, even environmental, are in fact getting better. We just rarely hear it.

Bjorn Lomborg’s op-ed is currently being syndicated with newspapers around the world. So far it has been published in multiple US newspapers including New York Post, Las Vegas Review-Journal, Press of Atlantic City and The Daily Courier as well as Financial Post (Canada), The Herald (United Kingdom), Business Day (South Africa), Berlingske (Denmark), Listy z naszego sadu (Poland), Addis Fortune (Ethiopia) and Voinamir (Bulgaria).

Facts on hurricanes are blowing in the wind

Despite what you may hear over and over again, Atlantic hurricanes are not becoming more frequent. The best long-term data shows that the frequency of hurricanes making landfall on the continental United States has declined slightly since 1900.

But many more people live in the paths of hurricanes compared to even a few decades ago. Florida had fewer than 600,000 houses in 1940 — today, that number is 17 times higher, at more than 10 million.

Yes, we need to find smart climate solutions. But if our goal is to protect lives and property from hurricanes, better infrastructure, fed by improved technology and wealth, does more than cutting carbon emissions.

Read more in Forbes and multiple American newspapers including Las Vegas Review-Journal, Boston Herald, The Reporter, The Mercury, The Times Herald, News Tribuneand The Times Herald.

Practical solutions to address climate change

Climate change is not the extinction-level event it is often characterized as. Still, it is a problem we need to address, focusing on smart, effective solutions. In his latest long-form interview on climate change and climate policy on Uncommon Knowledge (filmed at Stanford University), Lomborg discusses practical ways to lower our carbon footprint and emissions, pointing out why “carbon free by 2050” probably isn’t achievable without massive energy breakthroughs coming from green energy R&D.

He also recorded an hour-long podcast interview with Mark Moss, discussing the cost of climate change as well as our responses to it, including renewables, electric cars, greenwashing, biofuels and innovation.

People will rebel against green policies 

The disconnect between climate-worried global elites and the real world suffering from the energy crisis and the aftermath of the pandemic is growing by the day. The costs of the climate and environmental policies are quickly becoming unbearable, and people are starting to rebel against green diktats, as we have recently seen in the Netherlands and Sri Lanka.

Even under today’s policies that won’t get us close to the net zero target, EU vice-president and long-time climate action advocate Frans Timmermans admits many millions of Europeans may not be able to heat their homes this northern winter. This, he concludes, could lead to “very strong conflict and strife”. He’s right. When people are cold, hungry and broke, they rebel. If the elite continues pushing expensive policies that are disconnected from the urgent challenges facing most people, we need to brace for much more global chaos.

Read Bjorn Lomborg’s analysis in newspapers around the world, including Financial Post (Canada), The AustralianThe Philippine Daily Inquirer, City AM (UK), El Tiempo (Colombia), Milenio (Mexico), Listin Diario(Dominican Republic), La Prensa (Nicaragua), El Periodico (Guatemala), El Universal (Venezuela),
Business Day (South Africa), Addis Fortune (Ethiopia), Tempi (Italy), Finmag (Czech Republic) and multiple US newspapers such as Las Vegas Review-Journal, Press of Atlantic City, The Telegraph and The Times of Northwest Indiana.

Bjorn Lomborg

Net zero’s cost-benefit ratio is crazy high

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From the Fraser Institute

By Bjørn Lomborg

The best academic estimates show that over the century, policies to achieve net zero would cost every person on Earth the equivalent of more than CAD $4,000 every year. Of course, most people in poor countries cannot afford anywhere near this. If the cost falls solely on the rich world, the price-tag adds up to almost $30,000 (CAD) per person, per year, over the century.

Canada has made a legal commitment to achieve “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050. Back in 2015, then-Prime Minister Trudeau promised that climate action will “create jobs and economic growth” and the federal government insists it will create a “strong economy.” The truth is that the net zero policy generates vast costs and very little benefit—and Canada would be better off changing direction.

Achieving net zero carbon emissions is far more daunting than politicians have ever admitted. Canada is nowhere near on track. Annual Canadian CO₂ emissions have increased 20 per cent since 1990. In the time that Trudeau was prime minister, fossil fuel energy supply actually increased over 11 per cent. Similarly, the share of fossil fuels in Canada’s total energy supply (not just electricity) increased from 75 per cent in 2015 to 77 per cent in 2023.

Over the same period, the switch from coal to gas, and a tiny 0.4 percentage point increase in the energy from solar and wind, has reduced annual CO₂ emissions by less than three per cent. On that trend, getting to zero won’t take 25 years as the Liberal government promised, but more than 160 years. One study shows that the government’s current plan which won’t even reach net-zero will cost Canada a quarter of a million jobs, seven per cent lower GDP and wages on average $8,000 lower.

Globally, achieving net-zero will be even harder. Remember, Canada makes up about 1.5 per cent of global CO₂ emissions, and while Canada is already rich with plenty of energy, the world’s poor want much more energy.

In order to achieve global net-zero by 2050, by 2030 we would already need to achieve the equivalent of removing the combined emissions of China and the United States — every year. This is in the realm of science fiction.

The painful Covid lockdowns of 2020 only reduced global emissions by about six per cent. To achieve net zero, the UN points out that we would need to have doubled those reductions in 2021, tripled them in 2022, quadrupled them in 2023, and so on. This year they would need to be sextupled, and by 2030 increased 11-fold. So far, the world hasn’t even managed to start reducing global carbon emissions, which last year hit a new record.

Data from both the International Energy Agency and the US Energy Information Administration give added cause for skepticism. Both organizations foresee the world getting more energy from renewables: an increase from today’s 16 per cent to between one-quarter to one-third of all primary energy by 2050. But that is far from a transition. On an optimistically linear trend, this means we’re a century or two away from achieving 100 percent renewables.

Politicians like to blithely suggest the shift away from fossil fuels isn’t unprecedented, because in the past we transitioned from wood to coal, from coal to oil, and from oil to gas. The truth is, humanity hasn’t made a real energy transition even once. Coal didn’t replace wood but mostly added to global energy, just like oil and gas have added further additional energy. As in the past, solar and wind are now mostly adding to our global energy output, rather than replacing fossil fuels.

Indeed, it’s worth remembering that even after two centuries, humanity’s transition away from wood is not over. More than two billion mostly poor people still depend on wood for cooking and heating, and it still provides about 5 per cent of global energy.

Like Canada, the world remains fossil fuel-based, as it delivers more than four-fifths of energy. Over the last half century, our dependence has declined only slightly from 87 per cent to 82 per cent, but in absolute terms we have increased our fossil fuel use by more than 150 per cent. On the trajectory since 1971, we will reach zero fossil fuel use some nine centuries from now, and even the fastest period of recent decline from 2014 would see us taking over three centuries.

Global warming will create more problems than benefits, so achieving net-zero would see real benefits. Over the century, the average person would experience benefits worth $700 (CAD) each year.

But net zero policies will be much more expensive. The best academic estimates show that over the century, policies to achieve net zero would cost every person on Earth the equivalent of more than CAD $4,000 every year. Of course, most people in poor countries cannot afford anywhere near this. If the cost falls solely on the rich world, the price-tag adds up to almost $30,000 (CAD) per person, per year, over the century.

Every year over the 21st century, costs would vastly outweigh benefits, and global costs would exceed benefits by over CAD 32 trillion each year.

We would see much higher transport costs, higher electricity costs, higher heating and cooling costs and — as businesses would also have to pay for all this — drastic increases in the price of food and all other necessities. Just one example: net-zero targets would likely increase gas costs some two-to-four times even by 2030, costing consumers up to $US52.6 trillion. All that makes it a policy that just doesn’t make sense—for Canada and for the world.

Bjørn Lomborg

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Bjorn Lomborg

The stupidity of Net Zero | Bjorn Lomborg on how climate alarmism leads to economic crisis

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From spiked on YouTube

Note: This interview is focused on Europe and the UK.  It very much applies to Canada. The 2025 Federal Election which will see Canadians choose between a more common sense approach, and spending the next 4 years continuing down the path of pursuing “The Stupidity of Net Zero”.

European industry is in freefall, and Net Zero is to blame.

Here, climate economist Bjorn Lomborg – author of Best Things First and False Alarm – explains how panic over climate change is doing far more damage than climate change itself.  Swapping cheap and dependable fossil fuels for unreliable and expensive renewables costs our economies trillions, but for little environmental gain, Lomborg says.

Plus, he tackles the myth of the ‘climate apocalypse’ and explains why there are more polar bears than ever.

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