Bjorn Lomborg says Paris Agreement is a ‘Bad Deal’

John & Ken had another fascinating interview with environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Consensus and a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. His latest book is “False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet.”

Climate change is clearly an important global issue, but we are tackling it very badly and our overwhelming focus on reducing carbon emissions also distracts us from many of the world's most pressing problems. What makes it so hard to cut emissions is that CO2 is a byproduct of prosperous economies, and replacing cheap fossil fuels with today's mostly expensive and unreliable green alternatives remains incredibly expensive. An analysis for the government of New Zealand recently showed that achieving carbon neutrality by 2050 would cost the nation 16% of GDP.

Copenhagen Consensus Center President Bjørn Lomborg says global warming will have “mostly negative impacts”, but people need to have a “sense of proportion”.

“When temperatures rise, you’re going to see more heat, and hence more heatwaves and hence more heat deaths,” he told Sky News host Andrew Bolt.

“But what you don’t hear is that when temperatures rise, you also see less cold, less cold waves, and hence fewer cold deaths.”