Bjorn Lomborg

 About

About Bjorn Lomborg - Author and Speaker on the Environment and Climate Change:

Bjorn Lomborg is adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School and an international keynote speaker on climate change. He is the organizer of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, which brings together some of the world's top economists, including 5 Nobel laureates, to set priorities for the world. Time magazine named Lomborg one of the world's 100 most influential people in 2004. In 2008 he was named one of the 50 people who could save the planet by the UK Guardian; one of the top 100 public intellectuals by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazine in 2010 and 2011; and one of the world's 75 most influential people of the 21st century by Esquire.

Besides working as the director of Copenhagen Consensus and as adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School, Lomborg is the author of the best-selling The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool it in which he challenged mainstream concerns about the environment and pointed out that we need to focus attention on the most important problems first.

The Skeptical Environmentalist had its genesis in 1998, when Lomborg worked as an associate professor of statistics at the Department of Political Science at the University of Aarhus in Denmark. He published four lengthy articles about the state of the environment in a leading Danish newspaper, which resulted in a firestorm debate spanning over 400 articles in major metropolitan newspapers. The articles led to the publication of The Skeptical Environmentalist in 2001, which has now been published in every major language in the world.

Since the publication of The Skeptical Environmentalist, Lomborg has been a frequent participant in public debate. His commentaries have appeared regularly in such prestigious publications as the New York Times, Wall St. Journal, Globe & Mail, The Guardian, The Daily and Sunday Telegraph, The Times, The Australian, the Economist, the LA Times and Boston Globe. He has appeared on TV shows such as Politically Incorrect and ABC 60 minutes, Larry King, 20/20, 60 minutes and BBC Newsnight along with shows on CNN, BBC, CNBC, and PBS. In November 2001, Lomborg was selected "Global Leader for Tomorrow" by the World Economic Forum.

From February 2002 to July 2004 Lomborg was director of Denmark's national Environmental Assessment Institute. During this period he was named one of the 50 stars of Europe (as one of the 9 agenda setters in Europe) in Business Week. In April 2004, Lomborg was named one of the world's 100 most influential people by Time Magazine.

Lomborg organized Copenhagen Consensus in 2004, a project which brought together some of the world's top economists to prioritize the best solutions to the world's biggest challenges. Essentially, he asked these experts to tackle the question: With limited resources, how can we do the most good possible?

In June 2006 Lomborg repeated the Copenhagen Consensus project with top United Nations ambassadors instead of economists. He managed to bring together representatives from China, India and the USA, representing about half the world's population. Their ranking of solutions to the world's challenges was the first of its kind for the United Nations. These two conferences and their results have resulted in two books: Global Crises, Global Solutions and How to Spend $50 Billion to Make the World a Better Place. The last global Copenhagen Consensus project was held in May 2008.

In September 2007, Lomborg published Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Climate Change, a groundbreaking book that is transforming the debate about global warming by offering a fresh perspective based on human needs as well as environmental concerns. It has already been translated into 17 languages.

In October 2010 Cambridge University Press released Smart Solutions to Climate Change, edited by Bjorn Lomborg. The highly anticipated collection presents a very wide range of climate policy options including ones that are not well covered in the media, making it highly relevant to climate policy debates in search for a new treaty to succeed Kyoto. Also in November 2010, Lomborg released the documentary film, Cool It.

In his most recent offering, How to Spend $75 Billion to Make the World a Better Place, Bjorn presents the costs and benefits of the smartest solutions to twelve global problems. Featuring cutting-edge research of more than sixty eminent economists, four Nobel Laureates, and produced for the Copenhagen Consensus, this book will inform, enlighten and motivate actions to make the world a better place.

Bjorn is also the editor of How Much have Global Problems Cost the World? and Global Problems, Smart Solutions, out in the fall of 2013.

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 Topics

What Bjorn Lomborg Talks About:

The Truth about Global Warming
This thought-provoking talk is based on Dr. Lomborg’s bestselling book and film, Cool It. Here, Lomborg will demonstrate how we’re often told very one-sided and exaggerated claims about the environment and climate change, leading to unwarranted panic, instead of rationally assessing where and how we can do the most good. He argues that to tackle global warming we need smarter solutions focused on getting long-term solutions like cost-competitive renewables and that many of the impacts of global warming would be better addressed through adaptation.

Scorecard for Humanity: The World from 1900 to 2050
In this sweeping lecture, Dr. Lomborg covers how the development of the world across ten areas and 150 years, from 1900 to 2050, based on the research of more than 30 of the world’s top economists. He will look at how diverse problems from malnutrition and disease to global warming and biodiversity have progressed from the turn of the last century till today, and how development is likely to continue till mid-century. Some areas have improved, some have declined, but uniquely, Lomborg shows all of the developments in terms of percent of GDP, making a comparison across topics available for the first time. Based on his upcoming, groundbreaking book: Scorecard for Humanity, Lomborg will show us how humanity’s path so far has been one of unprecedented progress, which with some reservations, are likely to continue into the future. This is a hopeful talk for all that are interested in the long sweep of human history, based on the pure, economic facts.

How to Make Your Efforts Count: Feeling Good vs. Doing Good
Lomborg will energize participants with a controversial and stimulating session on how they can prioritize the world’s greatest problems. The organizer can choose between thirteen global issues like global warming, health, food, education, and natural disasters. Lomborg takes the audience through some of the best solutions for each problem, and asks the audience itself to rank these solutions according to their judgment of how effective these solutions might be. The premise is that we can’t solve every problem in the world, so we must ask, which ones should we fix first?

The cost and benefit information on the problems is based on years of work by 60+ of the world’s top economists, including four Nobel Laureates, which Lomborg gathers every four years for the Copenhagen Consensus. Presenting it to the audience, getting everyone involved and producing the audience’s priority list for the world at the end, offers a uniquely inspiring, entertaining and informative experience.

Limits to Growth: The fatal argument that put us on the wrong environmental track for decades
This hopeful talk is based on Dr. Lomborg’s much-publicized piece in Foreign Affairs. Here, he shows us how the argument for running out of resources and choking in pollution was wrong already when it was made, but has since proven spectacularly wrong. Despite us using ever more resources, we actually have more resources left over because of technology: we have become better at finding, utilizing and extracting them. Despite ever higher production, we are actually polluting the air and water less, again because of technology: we pollute much less because of cleaner production and smarter design.

It does not mean there are no environmental problems. But we can stop panicking and start thinking smartly about how to tackle the remaining problems in the best possible way. For instance, if we want to tackle global warming, we should focus less on unsupported alarmist messages and impotent moralizing. Instead, we should focus on what solved the problems for Limits to Growth: technology. We should make green energy much cheaper through innovation, while we investigate the very cheap opportunities of cooling the planet through geo-engineering. The opportunities are huge, and unlike the Kyoto Protocol and similar legislation, the costs could be 10s to 1000s of times cheaper, while we would do much more good.

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 Recent Publications

Brilliant, challenging and, most of all, sensible. Bjorn brings some much needed context to the climate change debate, and he's a wonderfully engaging speaker.

Reason Foundation

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