Bjørn Lomborg feels a chill

Global warming doesn't faze the infamous author, who argues that polar bears are doing fine and Al Gore is way too hot under the collar. But can the "skeptical environmentalist" back up his rosy views?

By Kevin Berger

Read more: Al Gore, Environment, Politics, News, Global Warming, Climate Change

Aug. 29, 2007 | Bjørn Lomborg drives people crazy. The tale of the controversy that swarmed his 2001 book, "The Skeptical Environmentalist," in which the native Dane argued that many environmental problems were overblown, has been widely told. With a few clicks you can read all about his skirmish with the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty and his protracted battle with Scientific American. In a flash you can find his defenders strafing his critics from their libertarian bunkers or congressional offices. When Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., wants to back up his claim that global warming is the "greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people," or invites somebody to Washington to debate Al Gore, he calls on Lomborg.

Lomborg, 42, rose to infamy by way of a Ph.D. in political science and a love affair with statistics. Today he is an adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School and the director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, where he strives to devise economic solutions to the world's pressing problems. Next week he will storm back into the cultural fray with "Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming," a highly readable asseveration that global warming is not so bad and that Al Gore is an inconvenient truth-stretcher.

Lomborg is such an iconoclastic figure that you are inclined to scrutinize his every remark. (Eban Goodstein, a professor of economics at Lewis and Clark College, reviews "Cool It" in an accompanying article.) But I used the question-and-answer format to give Lomborg his say because, like it or not, he is an internationally popular voice. A prestigious publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, has seen fit to publish and promote "Cool It," and the book has already racked up impressive orders on Amazon, rising to the top 10 on the site's Environmental Science list. I researched critical passages in "Cool It" and presented Lomborg with studies that challenged them. I looked at some of the reports that Lomborg used to make his key points -- "Polar bears aren't facing extinction" is one -- and read him passages from those same reports that he ignored.

Lomborg himself is a fascinating guy, a gay vegetarian lionized by rigid conservatives. In person, the tan and blond author appears to have just strolled out of a Jamba Juice in Malibu. He has a naturally friendly manner and speaks most of the time without sounding didactic. While he can be open and curious, I wouldn't rush to nominate him for a humility award. He has such a singular economic bead on the world that he can sound arrogant as he deflects any other point of view about global warming. But I enjoyed talking with him. We spoke in a conference room at Knopf, where out a panoramic window we could watch the beleaguered Hudson River flow to the ocean on a clear and hot New York day.

Why did you write "Cool It"?

Because we're stuck in this unproductive question, Is global warming a hoax or a catastrophe? Left-wingers say it's a catastrophe and we need to change our entire means of production and society. Right-wingers say we shouldn't bother with it all. If they were right, those conclusions might follow, but that's not what the science tell us. The science tells us that global warming is problem but not a catastrophe. On the other hand, it's not a hoax. I'm trying to make a middle ground for arguing that this is not a problem that will be solved within the next five or 10 years. This is a problem that will take a half or full century, and we need to be sure we have good ways of dealing with it.

You write, "Doing too little about climate change is definitely wrong. But so is doing too much." Why?

Doing too little is obvious, but let's say it anyway: If you don't do something about global warming, of course it will become a bigger problem. So obviously we need to address it and in the long term fix it. On the other hand, doing too much about it means we are focusing too much effort on climate change and forgetting all the other things that we have a responsibility to deal with, like HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and malnutrition. If we spend too much time and resources focusing on climate change, then we do the future a disservice because we say, "Hey, we fixed climate change but we let all the other things slide."

How can you separate climate change, which would lead to the despoilation of all the earth's living systems, from those problems? They are interrelated. What good does it to do to treat them as separate?

It's clear that they are all interrelated. But one of the things that seems curious in the climate change discussion is the insistence that climate change is linked to all these other issues. But they are equally linked back. When we talk about how global warming is going to make people more vulnerable to malaria, that's absolutely true. At the same time, rampant malaria is going to make everyone much more vulnerable to climate change. In a perfect world, we should fix all problems. But in a world where we haven't fixed all the problems in the last 50 years, it makes sense to ask, If you fix a large chunk of malaria, how much good do you do?

Yes, people will have to deal with more climate change, but maybe overall they'll be better off. It's like when your family has to decide where to live. It would be nice to have a great house and be close to a good school. But there's also a budget restriction. So you make trade-offs and say some things are more important to focus on first.

Why do you assume there is a zero sum of money for the world's problems and that it has to partitioned for one thing and not the other?

So you're saying, What if we had $1 billion for malaria and $1 billion for climate? Why not do both?

Isn't that how the world works? There are a lot of organizations devoted to these problems. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation gives billions to help fight malaria and AIDS. One organization or government doesn't steal from the other, right?

Recently the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria came out and said we have to recognize that over the coming years, because of the incredible attention to climate change, we're probably going to get much less money. [The Global Fund "is not naive about what (the increased importance of) global warming will do to AIDS funding in a few years' time," said Jon Liden, head of communications, as reported in the Financial Times.]

My point is much simpler. Let's assume we had $1 billion for each of these areas. If the $1 billion in malaria does a lot more good than the $1 billion in climate, and assuming that the next $1 billion will do the same thing, I would still argue, Shouldn't we then have a conversation about perhaps spending both billions on malaria and none on climate change? I'm not saying that's what we should do. But I'm saying we need to have that conversation. If we could spend that money better somewhere else, shouldn't we?

But, again, that's just a hypothetical question.

I prefer to call it an academic question. But you are absolutely right that we have a lot of organizations that will meet and say: We are about climate change. We are about acid rain. We are about HIV. The problem today is the organizations with the most riveting picture and the best stories end up winning the day. It's important to say this is not because environmentalists are bad guys. The tendency to exaggerate is one we have in our society. We base our views on images we typically see, but those images are not representative of what's actually happening.

A great example is the razing of rain forests. It's absolutely true: We do lose rain forests. But it's not surprising that you only see the razed areas -- that's the only place where cameras can go. So at the Copenhagen Consensus, we see ourselves as defenders of boring problems, the ones that don't get as much attention because they seem old hat. People dying from hunger? Yeah, we've heard that before. But maybe it's still an incredibly good place to spend money.

Tell us a little more about the Copenhagen Consensus.

We assembled a panel of eminent experts, including four Nobel laureates, to look at all these different problem areas and say, "Yeah, I know you think your solution is good, but we have to compare it to everyone else's." They asked, How much good can we do for every dollar spent? And ranked all the opportunities. It turned out that the best investment we can do is prevention of HIV/AIDS. For every dollar you spend on prevention of HIV/AIDS, you'll end up doing $40 worth of good. The same is true with malnutrition. For every dollar you spend on micronutrients, basically a vitamin pill, you would do about $30 worth of good. And that would affect more than half the world's population. With malaria, for every dollar you spend on mosquito nets and information and some medicine, you'd do about $10 worth of good.

Climate change ended up at the bottom of your list. So are you saying that climate change is not as significant as malaria, AIDS and malnutrition, and therefore we shouldn't spend public resources on it now?

I'm sure some people would see it that way. But what we're saying is for every $1 you spend as part of the Kyoto Protocol to reduce carbon emissions, you will do only about 30 cents' worth of good for the world. What that tells us is that the solutions that are proposed right now to climate change are fairly poor.

Malaria and AIDS are problems happening right now. How can you compare them to climate change, which will be at its most severe in the future?

In principle, we tried to value all of the impacts that these problems will have in the coming years and into the future. But we don't typically have models for malaria and HIV/AIDS like we do for global warming. So, yes, we don't know what exactly will happen to them in 2100. At the same time, we know HIV/AIDS kills a lot of people now and maims society because it takes away the primary caregivers. If we did something about it, it wouldn't just mean that people would stop dying now. It would also mean they would get much richer and be more resilient toward the end of the century to climate change. So it's not just about the people now. It would have huge effects for generations to come.

Couldn't we say that climate change is a far worse problem than malaria or AIDS or malnutrition? The resultant rise in sea level and heat, as well as the loss of biodiversity, could harm the entire planet and all species, right? Shouldn't we start solving the worst problem now?

And the worst problem being that everyone dies on the planet? Do we then search for immortality? I'm not just being facetious. You wouldn't do that, because a search wouldn't be very valuable, right? We would not find anything, but we would spend all of our resources looking for the philosopher's stone. It just doesn't make sense to talk about what's the problem without thinking about what's the solution. As for your idea that this could spoil the entire earth and so it's a much bigger problem than malaria, well, again, climate change is a problem, but it's not a catastrophe. It's not the end of the world by any means.

At the end of the day, Kyoto is both impossibly ambitious and environmentally inconsequential. It's not smart. It's just not in the nature of the political process to say we're going to do something now to solve a problem later on. So instead of saying, "Let's do something that feels good right now," let's try and think of what we could do that will do good now.

Which is what?

My primary solution is to focus on research and development. Invest .05 percent of GDP, or $25 billion, in the R&D of energy technologies that don't emit carbon. The problem now is we focus on cutting emissions. Basically we're going to spend almost all of the money to meet Kyoto on buying windmills or solar cells or, more likely, natural gas instead of coal, or more expensive ways of doing production. It seems reasonable for me to ask, Does that do very much good?

I agree that when you make it more expensive to use fossil fuels, people will spend more money on research and development. But let's not buy things right now that make us feel good but result in fairly trivial carbon cuts. As you probably know, we have lots of windmills in Denmark. We felt incredibly good about this in the '80s and '90s. So we spent a lot on windmills that turned out to inefficient. Now we basically have to take down all our old windmills and put up the new efficient ones. My point is that maybe we shouldn't have put up the first ones. We should have invested in research and development and waited to put up bigger, better windmills.

But wasn't that a necessary process? Creating the first windmills is what led to the development of better ones.

Yes, but if you want to get a better windmill, maybe you put up one or 10 or even 100. Economists disagree on this. But you don't need 1,000 or 10,000. My point is: Don't do stuff before it's efficient, but make sure you get faster to the point where it gets efficient.

But if we refocus our political energy away from climate change to the other problems you mention, aren't we then putting a barrier in front of the kind of research and development that you want? Isn't that dangerous?

But if you grant that argument, I would also say if we focus attention away from HIV/AIDS and malaria and malnutrition, that would also seem dangerous. That's why we need to have a sense of balance. I'm saying you should spend $25 billion on climate change but not $180 billion -- which is how much it would cost each year if the U.S. and everybody else lived up to the Kyoto protocol of reducing carbon emissions below 1990 levels. The $180 billion is the average outcome of all macroeconomic models gathered by the Stanford economic energy modeling forum.

All macroeconomic models?

Obviously not all. But it's all the main academic models from the very optimistic, which say it's only going to cost $50 billion, to the very pessimistic ones, which the Bush government likes to use, that show it's going to cost $400 billion. It's basically saying, "Don't take the most optimistic, and don't take the most pessimistic either. But take the average of that." This is not a true number. But it's in that range.

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