The Economist asks: Bjorn Lomborg

Copenhagen, Denmark’s capital, wants to be the world’s first CO2-neutral city by 2025. But, as many other well-meaning cities and countries have discovered, cutting CO2 significantly is more difficult than it seems, and may require quite a bit of creative accounting.
 

Around the world, thousands of children are striking for climate action. Spurred on by young Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, they want to convince adults to “panic.”

The campaign is supported by adults who feel the same way: Thunberg has been welcomed to the World Economic Forum in Davos, has delivered a TedTalk, and has been lauded in Rolling Stone and The Guardian.

Thunberg’s undeniable passion is directed at perhaps the only challenge in the world where a call for everyone to panic would be received with so little critical thought.

The World Health Organization estimates that climate change will cause an additional 250,000 deaths each year in the two decades following 2030, mostly among the world’s poor. The WHO compared the real world with an imaginary one in which there’s no climate change, calculating the difference in deaths from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhea, dengue fever, flooding and heat.