125. Bjorn Lomborg — False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet

Hurricanes batter our coasts. Wildfires rage across the American West. Glaciers collapse in the Artic. Politicians, activists, and the media espouse a common message: climate change is destroying the planet, and we must take drastic action immediately to stop it. Children panic about their future, and adults wonder if it is even ethical to bring new life into the world.

Enough, argues bestselling author Bjorn Lomborg. Climate change is real, but it’s not the apocalyptic threat that we’ve been told it is. Projections of Earth’s imminent demise are based on bad science and even worse economics. In panic, world leaders have committed to wildly expensive but largely ineffective policies that hamper growth and crowd out more pressing investments in human capital, from immunization to education.

False Alarm will convince you that everything you think about climate change is wrong — and points the way toward making the world a vastly better, if slightly warmer, place for us all.

In this wide-ranging conversation Shermer and Lomborg discuss:

• Is the planet warming?
• What is the cause of the warming?
• How much warmer is it going to get?
• What will the consequences of the warming be?
• What should we do about it?
• How the public discussion/debate over climate has changed in the past 20 years since Lomborg wrote The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World
• Precautionary Principle: should we do something “just in case”?
• What about other existential threats: AI apocalypse, nuclear weapons, pandemics? and
• Why climate is such a hard problem.

The claims:

• timeline: we have a decade to solve the problem … or else
• droughts, floods, hurricanes, and extreme weather
• deforestation/reforestation
• polar bears/the 6th Extinction, and
• AOC/Greta Thunberg/Al Gore.

Non-Solutions:

• individual action,
• why the Green Revolution isn’t here yet,
• why the Paris Agreement is failing,
• how climate policy hurts the poor, and
• reducing greenhouse gases.

Rational Solutions:

• carbon tax: a market-based solution,
• innovation,
• adaptation,
• geoengineering, and
• prosperity.

Bjorn Lomborg is the best-selling author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It. He is a visiting professor at Copenhagen Business School and at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. His work appears regularly in New York Times, Wall Street Journal, the Economist, the Atlantic, and Forbes. His monthly column appears in around 40 papers in 19 languages, with more than 30 million readers. In 2011 and 2012, Lomborg was named Top 100 Global Thinker by Foreign Policy. In 2008 he was named “one of the 50 people who could save the planet” by the Guardian. He lives in Prague.

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