Voters are rejecting climate policy as too costly with negligible results

In January 2010, Lomborg was interviewed by Joel Malan, an Australian now living in Copenhagen. JM: The Skeptical Environmentalist drew on your background in statistics to reach a more holistic interpretation of existing research. I understand you are not a climatologist as such, but what contribution can statistics make to the climate change debate?

Op-ed by Bjørn Lomborg in Project Syndicate.

The Doha meeting continued 20 years of failed climate negotiations, since the original Earth Summit in Rio in 1992. There, countries pledged to cut greenhouse-gas emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2000; the OECD countries fell short by almost 9%. The Kyoto Protocol from 1998 has almost entirely failed. And the effort intended to save the world in Copenhagen in 2009 collapsed spectacularly. 

The rich world’s fossil fuel hypocrisy is on full display in its response to the global energy crisis triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. While the wealthy G7 countries admonish the world’s poor to use only renewables because of climate concerns, Europe and the United States are going begging to Arab nations to expand oil production, Germany is reopening coal power plants and Spain and Italy are ramping up African gas production.