Bad investment

Bjorn Lomborg is a political scientist and professor at the Copenhagen Business School. He also directs the Copenhagen Consensus Center, where he researches “the smartest ways to help the world” using cost-benefit analysis. He’s the author of Best Things First and False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails To Fix the Planet. He is on the ­advisory board of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship and was a presenter at ARC’s 2025 conference, where I sat down with him for an interview.

How did you enter the climate ­policy critical space? About 25 years ago I came across the work of American economist Julian Simon who said that the climate was not as bad as we think, and for the most part, things are getting increasingly better. As a member of Greenpeace, I was sure that was a load of hogwash. But Simon encouraged people to check data for themselves, which is what I was always telling my grad students. So I decided that would be a fun semester project with the students, to analyze the data and prove him wrong. It turned out that on most everything, the data proved him right! That was an eye-opening experience to realize that while the individual problems were probably true, the overall statement “the environment is getting worse” is fantastically misleading. And I thought to myself, “We should be saying this more out loud.” That’s how it began.

How bad is climate change? Global warming is a real problem, but we don’t have a good handle on how big a problem. There’s no doubt the current Western narrative is that climate change is an existential problem bringing the end of the world and is what we all should be focusing on. Activists say, “Renewables are incredibly cheap. Let’s just get going and be green. We’ll all be great!” But that’s not going very well because it’s actually incredibly expensive. It deindustrializes, makes your energy much more expensive, and makes more people poor.

The reality is climate change will be a small problem by the end of the century. It’s not a problem now, and it will be a small problem by the end of the century. And if you do the math, it turns out that the cost of a reasonably likely outcome of climate change by the end of the century is that we’re going to be 2-3% less well off than we otherwise would be. And that’s taking into account that by the end of the century, globally we will all be much, much richer than we are now.

But climate change is still a problem that needs fixing, right? If you could fix a problem for very little money, you should do it. But if you could fix a small problem for an enormous amount of money, that’s a bad deal. To put it in numbers: If you can fix a 3% problem for 1% that’s a good deal. If you can only fix part of a 3% problem for 10% that’s stupid. And unfortunately, with our current climate policies we’re mostly engaging in the latter.

What do you propose as an alternative to climate hysteria? Two main points: The environment, if you look at the data, mostly gets better simply because if you get out of poverty, you stop being so dirty. This is not true for everything, and it’s not true in all circumstances. But fundamentally, that’s the case.

The second thing is this: Instead of being very emotional about all this, we should be calm and rational and recognize that we can’t fix all the problems. So we should ask, “What are the problems where I can spend extra resources and do the most good first?” So that’s what I’m doing now at the Copenhagen Consensus Center, where I work with three of the world’s top economists and seven Nobel laureates in economics.

You’ve said that current climate policies are immoral. Can you explain? What has made us rich, fun­damentally, is the fact that we have found others to do the work. If you were Louis XIV of France, you’d have lots of servants, and that’s great. But of course, it only works for Louis XIV. It doesn’t work for all the guys who are the servants.

The thing we’ve managed to do now is because we have lots and lots of energy—mostly from fossil fuels—it means that you and I and everybody else have literally the working equivalent of, say, a couple 100 servants working for us 24/7. That’s the energy that we get. That’s the washing machine, the dishwasher, the Zoomba, your car, and all these other amazing things that make your life much, much nicer.

The great deceit of many people in the First World is we have all these great conveniences and our lives are incredible by any historical standard, and then we look at poor countries and say, “You know what, you can’t actually get rich, because that’ll emit a lot of CO2, so you will have to do without. You just have to start getting used to being poor.” Not only is that immoral, but also they’re not going to listen to you! They’re not going to keep staying poor if there’s a way to get rich. And the way, very clearly—what we’ve done in the past, and what they will be doing, too—is to get much, much more energy.

What better ways could we be spending the resources directed at climate change? What we need to do is to find much cheaper green energy in the future. That’s what innovation does. We should be spending much more money on innovation so that we can more quickly find the thing that will actually power the rest of the 21st century.

What we should be doing is to make sure that the transition to lower zero carbon energy will happen sooner. Right now, we claim we’re doing a transition, but of course, we’re not. We’re just sub­sidizing immensely, a very expensive partial transition that’s not sustainable.

We need to ensure that future generations of technology are so cheap that everyone, not just rich, well-meaning Americans or Danes, but also the Chinese, the Indians, and Africans, will actually want to buy this stuff. And that’s how you fix this.

Given that much of the hyperbole around climate change involves reducing global temperatures to save lives, why is it more effective to put that money in other initiatives? If we have limited resources, we should do the smart things first. Take tuberculosis as an example: For about $6 billion a year, you could save about a million people’s lives. Malaria and heart disease are ­similar: We can make a big impact with relative little money. Immunization to small kids: By making sure that we treat moms and newborns very cheaply, we could save about 1.4 million moms and kids for about $3 billion.

Then there are economic things. Help people get better education, so they will learn more and become more productive in their adult lives. Get better high-yielding agriculture through research and development. Make sure you have better land tenure so you own your land, you’ll be more productive. Those are the things we should do first.

So why aren’t we already doing them? The fundamental point of cost benefit is there’s always trade-offs. If you do one thing, you can’t do another. Setting priorities is hard. It means that you have to say yes to something, but also say no to other things. And most people want to just say yes to everything, because it’s easy and it feels like you’re a good person. But of course, you’re not. If you say yes to everything, it means implicitly, you’ve said no to everything, but you said yes to a little bit of everything, which is just silly. You should take the courage to actually say yes to this and no to that, because this is more important. This is a better return on investment.

When the UN and all the world’s nations decided back in 2015 that they were going to set sustainability goals for the world for 2030, we were the only group to actually do cost-benefit analysis. I met with a third of all the UN ambassadors individually in New York, and they all loved the idea of saying, some things are much better than others. And then I told them, so whatever you do, please, please, please, don’t promise everything to everyone. And of course, that was exactly what they did. And that was why we ended up with 169 promises, which is just silly. And so again, my point is to say, if you can’t do everything, do the smart stuff first.