bjorn.jpg- Bjorn Lomborg, an economist, was named one of the "50 people who could save the planet" by the center-left Guardian newspaper in the UK.
- Lomborg is author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It
- He is one of the world's 100 most influential people - Time Magazine, 2004
- 'Young Global Leader' - World Economic Forum 2005
- One of the "50 people who could save the planet" - UK Guardian in 2008
- In 2002, Lomborg and the Environmental Assessment Institute founded the Copenhagen Consensus, which sought to establish priorities for advancing global welfare using methodologies based on the theory of welfare economics.
- In his writings, Lomborg argues that, while global warming is a genuine concern, the problem needs to be dealt with in a responsible way. He suggests that the solutions currently suggested by Kyoto etc. are both prohibitively expensive, and therefore will not be followed-through, but even if they were fully implemented, they would result in only a minuscule change, perhaps slowing global warming by only 5 years or so, by even the most optimistic predictions.
- Lomborg maintains that there can be no ten-year quick-fix solution, that climate change is a 100-year problem. Lomborg explains why his research has led him to believe that other strategies like environmental R&D or combating aids/HIV and Malaria would yield a much higher benefit to the planet for lesser investment of the world’s financial resources. He argues for the need to utilize a cost-benefit analysis of measures proposed to tackle global warming and other global problems.
- Lomborg argues that spending even a fraction of the cost of Kyoto (for example - .5% of GDP) on actual research needed to advance environmental solutions, alternate fuels, clean vehicles, etc. would result in a much higher reduction in global warming, and it would be politically feasible to secure such funding, unlike Kyoto. This puts Lomborg's book at odds with the 2006 Stern Review, which concludes that by investing one percent of global GDP it would be possible to avoid the worst effects of climate change and that failure to do so could damage global GDP by up to twenty percent, possibly resulting in the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen. The Stern Review is the largest report to date on the economics of global warming.
Bookmark/Search this post with:
