Cost-Effective Approaches to Save the Environment, with Bjorn Lomborg

Recorded on February 11, 2019.

How much will it cost to slow climate change? Bjorn Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, performs cost-benefit analysis on the Green New Deal and the UN’s Climate Report, analyzes the economic impact of climate change in the next century, and proposes economically feasible alternative plans to reduce climate change.

Is climate change the rapidly impending apocalypse it seems? Bjorn Lomborg discusses climate change as depicted in doomsday films like The Day after Tomorrow and breaks down why it will not be an instantaneous apocalypse as often portrayed. He talks about the economic impact climate change will have on the global GDP in the next one hundred years if not solved and the impact on the global GDP if money is spent towards resolving it. He details the reasons Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal is not feasible in the ten-year timeline she has proposed and why, even if it were feasible, it would be prohibitively expensive. He discusses the reality of reducing the amount of energy used in developing countries and how it’s unlikely that those countries will be willing to give up on things like electricity now that they have it.

Lomborg suggests that the best way to resolve climate change is to put money now towards research and development for new, cleaner sources of energy that are cheaper than coal and natural gas, because countries will be much more likely to adopt a new energy resource if it is the cheapest option. Finding cheaper energy solutions will have a positive impact on global GDP, and people will be much more willing to adopt it. He also suggests implementing a modest carbon tax, which would have a great long-term impact on reducing climate change.

Related Resources

• Free-Market Environmentalism
• Carbon Taxes: The Most Efficient Way to Reduce Emissions
• Energy Efficiency: Our Best Source of Clean Energy
• Identifying Smart Climate-Change Policies
• Statement Backing Hoover Fellow and Stanford Professor’s Carbon-Tax Proposal Garners Record-Setting Support from Economists
• The Conservative Case for Carbon Dividends