Lomborg on Stossel: Whom can you trust?

Obama's Global Warming Straddle (...) The skeptics may not be winning the debate in the media, but they're "winning the reality" according to Bjørn Lomborg, author of the bestseller The Skeptical Environmentalist. Lomborg points out that despite "tremendous amounts of worrying .  .  . if you look at actual reductions in CO2 over the last few years, nothing." Lomborg isn't opposed to government action, but he derides cap-and-trade regimes as a way for politicians to "put on a tax and get people to think it's a cool thing." (...) Read full article here

Last week, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a plan to reduce plastic pollution, which will include a ban on single-use plastics as early as 2021. This is laudable: plastics clog drains and cause floods, litter nature and kill animals and birds.

Of course, plastic also makes our lives better in a myriad of ways. In just four decades, plastic packaging has become ubiquitous because it keeps everything from cereals to juice fresher and reduces transportation losses, while one-use plastics in the medical sector have made syringes, pill bottles and diagnostic equipment safer.

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