Bjorn Lomborg: US needs to start fracking for energy independence

Intelligence Squared US debate series: Tuesday, January 13, 2009 Major reductions in carbon emissions are not worth the money Moderator: John Donvan Speaking for the motion: Bjorn Lomborg, Philip Stott and Peter Huber Speaking against the motion: L. Hunter Lovins, Oliver Tickell and Adam Werbach THIS EVENT WILL BE RECORDED FOR BBC WORLD NEWS. Panelists for the motion Bjorn Lomborg is the author of the bestsellers Cool It and The Skeptical Environmentalist.

At the Glasgow climate conference, President Biden declared climate change an “existential threat to human existence as we know it.” No, it’s not. Climate change is not a meteor hurtling toward Earth to destroy humanity. Rather, it is a chronic, manageable condition humanity can live with. So argues Bjorn Lomborg, author of the book “False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet.”

Over the past decade, the global elite’s obsession with climate change has taken away from the many other major problems facing the planet — shown most dramatically by the invasion of Ukraine. Western European leaders should have spent the past decade diversifying energy sources and expanding shale gas, instead of shutting down nuclear plants and becoming scarily reliant on Russia. But the looming war is far from the only thing they have managed to ignore.