Sydney: The Skeptical Environmentalist

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Global warming is a problem that we should tackle… smartly. But climate change will not mark the end of the world. The UN’s best estimate of the costs of unmitigated global warming by the end of the century is about 4% of global GDP. This is a problem, though not an emergency.

With a sense of proportion, Dr Bjorn Lomborg presented a coherent argument on how to tackle climate smartly. Crucially, for most of the world’s 7.5 billion people, climate change comes far down the list of priorities when faced with infant mortality from easily curable diseases and malnutrition, suffering from poor education and low energy access.

In our eagerness to enact climate policies, we could easily end up making the world worse off — even if we tackle climate smartly, the policies could end up costing as much as 16% of global GDP or more.

Bjorn Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus Centre and author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, Cool It and How to Spend $75 Billion to Make the World a Better Place.