Environment

Bjorn Lomborg gave a TED Talk in New York on How Much Have Global Problems Cost the World? A Scorecard from 1900 - 2050. He presents a new way to compare global problems and shows that the world is becoming a better, more livable place.

2013-11-11 Subsidizing first-generation, inefficient green energy might make well-off people feel good about themselves, but it won't transform the energy market. Yet when inefficient green subsidies are criticized, their defenders can be relied on to point out that the world subsidizes fossil fuels even more heavily. But the misinformation surrounding energy subsidies is considerable, and it helps keep the world from enacting sensible policy.

2013-10-19 Ignore the doomsters: on nearly every measure our planet is getting fairer, healthier and safer. 

2013-10-14 FOR the past half century, a fundamental debate has raged between optimists and pessimists over the state of the world. Pessimists build their case on overpopulation, starvation and depletion of resources. Optimists stand for the infallibility of the market economy. Wouldn't it be nice to remove the darkened or rose-tinted spectacles for once, and try to quantify how the world really has done and will do in future? I asked some of the world's leading economists to do just that. The result is a groundbreaking book, How Much Have Global Problems Cost The World?

2013-10-07 Australian science magazine COSMOS features a 5-page portrait of Bjorn Lomborg in its October/November edition. 

2013-09-03 Contrary to what you may have heard, there is no “bee-pocalypse.” There is lots of alarmist talk about colony collapse disorder, people are blaming pesticides and talking about hundreds of billions of dollars at risk. But a closer look tells a very different story. Read the article online.

2013-08-15 Nyligen kunde vi läsa nya överdrifter om miljöproblemen. Detta får politiker att satsa mer pengar på meningslösa miljöprojekt, i stället för på viktig forskning om grön energi. Det skriver Bjørn Lomborg. 

2013-08-10 Bad news sells – that’s why we hear so much of it. But it can leave us with a panicked sense that the world is full of problems that urgently need to be fixed. And panic is rarely a good basis for smart policy. 

Last week an extraordinary, scary story made climate headlines around the world: a melting Arctic could release an immense amount of methane that would dramatically increase global warming and cost the world a phenomenal $60tn. Fortunately, it is just a scare story. Of course, if you take an implausibly catastrophic event and run it through an implausibly pessimistic economic model, you can get headlines, but you don’t get good policy. The depressing reality is that current climate policies have failed.