Lomborg in Rolling Stone

COPENHAGEN – The world has generally become a much better place during the last half-century. Skeptics will scoff at the idea of overall improvement, but the numbers don’t lie. The task we face now is to make the world even better.

Bjorn Lomborg, President of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, talks about the costs and benefits of attacking climate change with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Lomborg argues that we should always be aware of tradeoffs and effectiveness when assessing policies to reduce global warming. He advocates for realistic solutions that consider the potential to improve human life in other ways. He is skeptical of the potential to move away from fossil fuels and argues that geo-engineering and adaptation may be the most effective ways to cope with climate change.

Politicians are gathering in Poland for a climate summit being billed as the most important conference since the Paris treaty was signed in 2015. Around the world the chattering classes have declared that more political willpower is needed to solve global warming. This is deluded: it ignores the privileged place climate change has among all of humanity’s challenges and misses the real reasons for our failure.