World chaos looms thanks to elites’ policies

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Published

2 years ago

8 minute read

By Bjorn Lomborg InsideSources.com

The disconnect between the global elite and the real world is growing daily. Most people are worn down by the pandemic, food and energy price hikes and general inflation, and they worry about a recession. Yet, the chattering classes are jetting into conferences in Davos or Aspen to declare that our biggest, immediate threats are climate change, environmental disasters and biodiversity loss.

This ignores most of our urgent crises. Almost a billion people are at risk of starvation this year, exacerbated by climate-concerned opposition to fertilizers made with fossil fuels. More than a billion schoolchildren have missed an average of nine months of learning because of lockdowns, which will cost their generation $1.6 trillion every year by 2040. Millions in the rich world will unnecessarily die of undiagnosed cancer and heart disease ignored during COVID, while millions more in the poor world will die unnecessarily of malaria and tuberculosis, just like they always do.

If you’re a wealthy, climate-concerned jet setter with private health insurance and a safe job, you don’t need to worry about malaria, recession, waiting in line for cancer tests or your children falling behind when schools close again. Nor are these the issues that will get you attention or airtime.

Solving the real world’s big problems is messy, and progress is slow and unspectacular. It is far more exhilarating to make grand promises to save the entire world by going net-zero or abandoning synthetic fertilizers.

Climate change is a real, man-made problem that deserves attention. It is also wildly overblown in the media, with every weather “event” turned into a televisual catastrophe. Last year, newspapers overflowed with stories of devastating hurricanes. Yet, 2021 had the fewest hurricanes globally since satellites started consistently monitoring the world in 1980. Hundreds of deaths from heat waves top the news for days, as in Europe just now, even though the data show everywhere many more people — 4.5 million globally — die of cold temperatures, often because of a lack of heating exacerbated by high energy prices.

The costs of the climate and environmental policies pushed at establishment talkfests are quickly becoming unbearable. For decades, we have been told that ending fossil fuels is cost-free or even beneficial. Now, we are seeing the immense economic and security costs of such untethered promises. Early pushback came in France with the “yellow vest” protests.

The Netherlands has been roiled by protests since the government introduced policies that would decimate the agricultural industry in the name of the environment. The policies threaten the production of the world’s second-largest food exporter right when global hunger is rising, yet the government cannot change course because environmentalists have taken legal action to lock in the lopsided policies.

It is even worse in Sri Lanka. Egged on by elite campaigners and the World Economic Forum to go organic, the government banned synthetic fertilizers in April 2021. Predictably, food production collapsed, and the currency defaulted. Large-scale protests from hungry and dissatisfied citizens who overran the presidential palace have now forced the resignation of the government.

Solving many of these problems is not rocket science. The rich should stop making food more expensive by insisting on organics. They should stop making energy more expensive by dictating intermittent renewables. Instead, we should increase research and development into better seeds to deliver more food with a lower environmental footprint. We should drive green-energy breakthroughs that could make drastic carbon-dioxide reductions cheap and feasible. And we should include the many other urgent crises that have simple and effective solutions — for instance, for tuberculosis and for securing much better learning in schools across the world with computer-assisted teaching at the right level.

Unfortunately, the elite seems to double down on climate and environment, and the Netherlands and Sri Lanka are just warnings of what will come. Net-zero will be the costliest policy that the world has ever embarked upon. The price tag just for paying for renewable assets and infrastructure alone will be more than $5 trillion every year for the next three decades, according to McKinsey &Co., a global management consulting firm. This equates to more than one-third of the global tax intake. For the United States, one study shows that getting 80 percent of the way to President Joe Biden’s climate promises by midcentury would cost each American more than $5,000 every year. Going all the way would likely more than double that cost.

Every year the European Union has to pay $68.5 billion in subsidies to support its renewables. But if the bloc persists — or is forced by courts — with its even stauncher net-zero promises, this price tag could explode to more than $1 trillion annually.

As in the Netherlands, governments will find themselves caught between environmentalists who use legal action to hold them to virtue-signaling vows and working families who cannot cope with rising prices.

The wild increases in energy prices in Europe, although partly caused by poorly designed climate policies, are mostly because of Russia’s indefensible war with Ukraine. But the energy cost could increase more every year for everyone if politicians double down on net-zero.

Even under today’s policies, European Union vice president and longtime climate action advocate Frans Timmermans acknowledges that many millions of Europeans might be unable to heat their homes this winter. This, he concludes, could lead to “very, very strong conflict and strife.”

He’s right. When people are cold, hungry and broke, they rebel. If the elite continues pushing incredibly expensive policies that are disconnected from the urgent challenges facing most people, we need to brace for much more global chaos.

Bjorn Lomborg

Bjorn Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His new book is “False Alarm — How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet.” He wrote this for InsideSources.com

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Bjorn Lomborg

Climate change hasn’t set the world on fire

Published on August 27, 2023

Todayville

From Bjorn Lomborg of the Copenhagen Consensus Center

One of the most common tropes in our increasingly alarmist climate debate is that global warming has set the world on fire. But it hasn’t.

For more than two decades, satellites have recorded fires across the planet’s surface. The data are unequivocal: Since the early 2000s, when 3% of the world’s land caught fire, the area burned annually has trended downward. In 2022, the last year for which there are complete data, the world hit a new record-low of 2.2% burned area.

Lomborg points out in in Wall Street Journal (also in New York Post without paywall) that you’ll struggle to find that reported anywhere. Instead, media like the New York Times and climate activists often suggest that we’re facing a fiery climate apocalypse, scaring us into supporting even very expensive climate policies.

Although many argue that climate policy is the only way to fix fires, that is just embarrassingly wrong. Prescribed burning, improved zoning and enhanced land management are much faster, more effective and cheaper solutions for tackling fires.

Let’s make the world better and stop the fear-mongering

Fear-mongering and the suppression of truly inconvenient truths are pushing us dangerously toward the wrong solutions.

Jordan Peterson and Lomborg highlight how the meaningful exchange of truly diverse ideas and perspectives has withered over recent decades.

Instead, we need to foster critical thinking and constructive discussion. This is the goal of the new Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), an international coalition of politicians, business leaders, public intellectuals and cultural commentators.

One of the crucial goals is to help the poorer half of the world focusing on the 12 best policies identified in Copenhagen Consensus’ Halftime project.

The ARC event is by invitation only, but Peterson along with Lomborg and others will host an evening event on November 1 for 15,000 people at the O2 in London (more than 2/3 of tickets have been sold already).

Read Lomborg and Peterson’s article for newspapers around the world, including New York Post, The Telegraph (UK), National Post (on the front page, see left picture above) and Calgary Herald (Canada), The Australian, Business Times (Singapore), Philippine Daily Inquirer, Jakarta Post (Indonesia), Dhaka Tribune (Bangladesh), Daily Graphic (Ghana), Addis Fortune (Ethiopia), Daily Mail (Zambia, print only), New Times (Rwanda), Al-Ahram (Egypt), An-Nahar (Lebanon, in Arabic) Jordan Times, El Tiempo (Colombia), La Prensa (Nicaragua), El Universal (Venezuela), Portfolio (Hungary) and a large number of newspapers across the US, including Detroit News (right picture above), Las Vegas Review-Journal and Santa Maria Times.

Best Things First now available as audiobook

Bjorn Lomborg’s new book Best Things First* (named one of the best summer books of 2023 by Financial Times) is now available as an audiobook.

The book shows how the world’s 12 most efficient policies, for just $35 billion a year, could save more than four million lives per year, and generate annual economic benefits worth over a trillion dollars.

Ahead of the UN General Assembly next month where the Global Goals for 2030 will be a major talking point, Lomborg is promoting the most effective solutions in media around the world, urging the UN and its member states to prioritize those solutions that will do the greatest amount of good per dollar spent.

Take a look at his new interviews e.g. with Tom Bilyeu, Michael Shermer, the Ricochet podcast, VOA Africa and Thought Economics.

Earlier, Lomborg also discussed the book on TV shows and podcasts hosted by Fareed Zakaria, Julia Hartley-Brewer, Will Cain, Jordan Peterson, TRIGGERnometry, Steven Crowder, Adam Carolla, Brendan O’Neill and Andrew Bolt.

*As an Amazon Associate, the Copenhagen Consensus Center earns from qualifying purchases.

Climate alarmism leads to poor policies

As surely as temperatures rise during the summer, climate alarmism serves up more stories of life-threatening heat domes, apocalyptic fires, and biblical floods, all blamed squarely on global warming. Yet, the data to prove this link is often cherry-picked, and the proposed policy responses are enormously ineffective.

Take the tragic fire in Hawaii, for example. It is lazy and unhelpful for pundits to use the tragedy to incorrectly blame climate change. They claim it was tinder-box dry, but through most of the past 23 years, Maui County was drier than the week it burned. The drought is blamed on climate, but the most recent scientific study shows no climate signal. Lomborg argues in an interview on FOX News that pointing wrongly to climate change is dangerous because cutting emissions is one of the least-effective ways to help prevent future fires.

In his brand new article for New York Post, he writes that if we want to do better on climate, we must resist the misleading, alarmist climate narrative. Panic is a terrible advisor.

Lomborg on social media

Data: Fire has burned lowest area in the US in a decade

The easy fix that could save countless lives worldwide

More environmental or climate-specific knowledge leads to people having less climate change anxiety

10x more cold deaths than heat deaths in Europe

Is the US “rapidly shifting away from fossil fuels”?

Wildfire emits ever less CO₂

About Bjorn Lomborg and the Copenhagen Consensus

Dr. Bjorn Lomborg researches the smartest ways to improve the environment and the world.

He is the author of several best-selling books, Visiting Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and he has worked with many hundreds of the world’s top economists, including seven Nobel Laureates. TIME Magazine has named him one of the world’s 100 most influential people.

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 35+ newspapers across all continents in more than a dozen languages.

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.

Thank you for your continued interest .

David Lessmann
Communications Manager
Copenhagen Consensus Center
[email protected]

Bjorn Lomborg

Actions That Would Do More Good Than Wasting Trillions on Climate Change

Published on June 28, 2023

Todayville

From Stossel TV

Bjorn Lomborg studies solutions for the world’s biggest problems. He says we should spend on the “best things first.”

I asked people on the street in New York how they’d spend money to help the world. Fixing climate change was the most common answer.

Lomborg agrees that climate change is a problem that may threaten our kids someday. But he also says, “if you live most other places on the planet, you’re worried about the fact that your kids might die from easily curable diseases tonight.”

Lomborg has a cheaper plan that would save millions of lives.

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Libertarian journalist John Stossel created Stossel TV to explain liberty and free markets to young people. Prior to Stossel TV he hosted a show on Fox Business and co-anchored ABC’s primetime newsmagazine show, 20/20.

Stossel’s economic programs have been adapted into teaching kits by a non-profit organization, “Stossel in the Classroom.” High school teachers in American public schools now use the videos to help educate their students on economics and economic freedom. They are seen by more than 12 million students every year.

Stossel has received 19 Emmy Awards and has been honored five times for excellence in consumer reporting by the National Press Club. Other honors include the George Polk Award for Outstanding Local Reporting and the George Foster Peabody Award