Lomborg named Top 100 Global Thinker by Foreign Policy "for looking more right than ever on the politics of climate change"
The FP Top 100 Global Thinkers
Foreign Policy presents a unique portrait of 2011's global marketplace of ideas and the thinkers who make them.
DECEMBER 2011
Bjorn Lomborg
For looking more right than ever on the politics of climate change.
Director, Copenhagen Consensus, Denmark
With international action on limiting climate change seemingly stalled, it must be hard for Bjorn Lomborg to resist an "I told you so." The Danish environmental researcher has been a longtime dissenter from the conventional wisdom calling for international agreements to limit carbon emissions. Lomborg emphasizes the massive costs and argues that they would in any case have minimal effect on global warming-- inconvenient truths that help explain why the grand ambitions of the expiring Kyoto Protocol and sundry U.N. conferences have come to naught. As for climate change, Lomborg insists he's no denier and that his beef is with activists who hawk clearly unworkable solutions. Some have still labeled him a climate-change skeptic -- former U.S. Vice President Al Gore reportedly refuses to appear on the same stage as Lomborg -- but he continues to have an outsized impact in the public sphere.
His Copenhagen Consensus project was launched in 2004 to prioritize the world's most intractable problems, with efforts to solve climate change ending up well below what he considers more solvable challenges, such as malaria and HIV/AIDS. As Lomborg told Salon, "It seems evidently moral to ask: How can I do the most that I possibly can with the money that I'm going to be spending?"
