Climate Change Is Not an Emergency: A Discussion With Bjorn Lomborg

The rich world’s fossil fuel hypocrisy is on full display in its response to the global energy crisis triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. While the wealthy G7 countries admonish the world’s poor to use only renewables because of climate concerns, Europe and the United States are going begging to Arab nations to expand oil production, Germany is reopening coal power plants and Spain and Italy are ramping up African gas production.

Op-ed by Bjørn Lomborg in Project Syndicate.

The Doha meeting continued 20 years of failed climate negotiations, since the original Earth Summit in Rio in 1992. There, countries pledged to cut greenhouse-gas emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2000; the OECD countries fell short by almost 9%. The Kyoto Protocol from 1998 has almost entirely failed. And the effort intended to save the world in Copenhagen in 2009 collapsed spectacularly. 

The outcome of the UN Climate Summit in Glasgow (COP26) has been criticised by commentators as unambitious, with some calling it a “monumental failure”. Even the summit’s host, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, admitted the deal was “tinged with disappointment”. This is hardly sur­prising: historically, most climate promises have fared badly.