Bjorn Lomborg quotes

Bjorn Lomborg is a Danish scientist and author, known for his work on environmental issues and policy analysis. His book "The Skeptical Environmentalist" sparked global debate about environmental priorities and resource management. He advocates for cost-effective and practical solutions to the world’s most pressing challenges. Here are 39 of his quotes:

Think on a 50-year scale, which is a much more natural time-scale for global warming. The US is right now spending about 200 million dollars annually on research into renewable energy.

Bjorn Lomborg

The obvious issue is providing clean drinking water and sanitation to every single human being on earth at the cost of little more than one year of the Kyoto treaty.

Bjorn Lomborg

The second thing is, if you want to do something about global warming, you have to think much more long-term. There is something wrong with saying we should start using renewables now, while they are still incredibly expensive.

Bjorn Lomborg

On average, global warming is not going to harm the developing world.

Bjorn Lomborg

To prepare adequately for the challenge of global warming, we must acknowledge both the good and the bad that it will bring. If our starting point is to prove that Armageddon is on its way, we will not consider all of the evidence, and will not identify the smartest policy choices.

Bjorn Lomborg

I think it's great that we have organisations like Greenpeace. In a pluralistic society, we want to have people who point out all the problems that the Earth could encounter. But we need to understand that they are not presenting a full and rounded view.

Bjorn Lomborg

Obviously any group that has to have funding also needs to get attention to their issues.

Bjorn Lomborg

The Kyoto treaty has an estimated cost of between US$150 and $350 billion a year, starting in 2010.

Bjorn Lomborg

So it's mainly a question of helping the Third World overcome the effects of global warming.

Bjorn Lomborg

Listen, global warming is a real problem, but it's not the end of the world. A 30-centimetre sea level rise is just not going to bring the world to a standstill, just like it didn't over the last 150 years.

Bjorn Lomborg

It seems incontrovertible to me that there is a global warming effect and that it is going to be serious, probably not in the amount of, say, six degrees warming, but it's likely that we'll get two to three degrees warming and that will be serious enough.

Bjorn Lomborg

The fact that we're catching more fish per person than we've ever done before doesn't mean that there are not particular places where we've managed fisheries badly.

Bjorn Lomborg

Of course, the world is full of problems. But on the other hand it's important to get the sense... are we generally moving in the right direction or the wrong direction?

Bjorn Lomborg

Even if I was a bad right wing guy, to the extent of whether my arguments are right or wrong, they're right or wrong independently if I'm right or left.

Bjorn Lomborg

We worry about the seemingly ever-increasing number of natural catastrophes. Yet this is mainly a consequence of CNN - we see many more, but the number is roughly constant, and we manage to deal much better with them over time. Globally, the death rate from catastrophes has dropped about fifty-fold over the past century.

Bjorn Lomborg

We need to invest dramatically in green energy, making solar panels so cheap that everybody wants them. Nobody wanted to buy a computer in 1950, but once they got cheap, everyone bought them.

Bjorn Lomborg

The only thing that will really change global warming in the long run is if we radically increase the speed with which we get alternative technologies to deal with climate change.

Bjorn Lomborg

Global warming is real - it is man-made and it is an important problem. But it is not the end of the world.

Bjorn Lomborg

If every country committed to spending 0.05 per cent of GDP on researching non-carbon-emitting energy technologies, that would cost $25 billion a year, and it would do a lot more than massive carbon cuts to fight warming and save lives.

Bjorn Lomborg

I think Al Gore has done a great service in making global warming cool. He's basically taken it from a nerdy, almost ignored issue to making it what it is - namely, a problem.

Bjorn Lomborg

I tentatively believe in a god. I was brought up in a fairly religious home. I think the world is compatible with reincarnation, karma, all that stuff.

Bjorn Lomborg

I found university a little dispiriting. I thought I would enter the great halls of Plato, but instead I entered the halls of an intellectual sausage factory. I wanted to do something not on the main course, and chose the environment.

Bjorn Lomborg