A Vindication of Bjorn Lomborg

Around the world, ever more countries and regions are promising to stop emitting carbon dioxide sometime in the future. The European Union is winning plaudits from green activists for aiming to be “carbon neutral” by 2050. Cities from Adelaide to Boston to Rio de Janeiro are announcing similar goals, with Copenhagen saying it will get there already in 2025.

The follow-up meeting to the 2015 Paris climate accord on Dec 12 will be slightly less impressive than the original. Having dumped the Paris Agreement, US President Donald Trump is going to skip, and China and India are sending ministers instead of their leaders. But we will hear the same defiance coming from Paris as we have heard for the past two years: the Paris Agreement will continue, even without the US.

The global goals are a phenomenal idea. They’re what happened when the United Nations came together and said: “Here are the world’s biggest problems, and here is how we’re going to measure progress on them.” The 17 goals include promises to end extreme poverty and hunger, fix climate change and education, and reduce inequality and corruption.