Pressing Pause In Climate Alarmism In Favor Of Smarter Solutions

The FP Top 100 Global Thinkers
Foreign Policy presents a unique portrait of 2012's global marketplace of ideas and the thinkers who make them.

58 BJORN LOMBORG
For taking the black and white out of climate politics.
Director, Copenhagen Consensus Center | Czech Republic

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's diversion of $1 billion of development funds to climate aid might please climate activists at the Paris summit, but it's one of the least effective ways of helping the world's poor.

What would help is support for an end to the $680 billion wasted on annual fossil fuel subsidies that not only increase CO₂ but suck dry the public purse in many developing countries, keeping funds from areas that need it.

In “Solar and wind are viable, not just ‘feel-good’ climate solutions” (Sept. 27), Jim Davidson made a Counterpoint to my recent arguments about green energy (“Feel-good solutions won’t solve climate change,” Sept. 22).

Davidson supports my championing of spending $100 billion a year on green energy R&D. He suggests that this is a new position. But I have in fact advocated it consistently for a decade, including in a front-page article in the British newspaper The Guardian in 2010.