Bjørn Lomborg

And the reason is that for 20 years, the West, primarily Europe, but the West has been closing refineries.

Bjorn Lomborg points out that Europe shut 30 refineries between 2009 and 2024.

Why would they do that, you ask? Net zero climate change, maybe? Since 2020, by Alex's figures, Australia lost half its refining capacity.

Britain over 9%.

One recent dip cannot erase decades of variability or turn every fluctuation into proof of climate catastrophe.

And an establishment-critical view comes from author Bjorn Lomborg.

Even if climate change poses real risks, two things such as Antarctic sea ice boring trillions into policies that barely move the temperature needle for a century carries huge opportunity costs.

That same money could do far more for nutrition, health, education, and poverty, transforming millions of lives.

Credibility, you know, has to be taken into consideration when you keep throwing out all these catastrophic scenarios and not one of them come true.

And that's really where B- Bjorn Lomborg came in saying, you know, he really came to the forefront when he said on climate change, he goes, "Well, wait a minute, it's a...

You know, uh, do I believe, uh, that probably, you know, uh, uh, man has something to do, uh, with, you know, the global warming gases in the atmosphere and could it possibly be happening-

Mm

It's no longer front of mind in the same way, but...

I was always persuaded and impressed with the work of Bjorn Lomborg, who started from the premises.

Okay, this is happening.

What should we do? What are all the trade-offs that we can do that can hurt us, can harm us? And how does this stack up against the universe of solvable problems that are happening worldwide? How do we do the environment or just like stuff that we can do to improve people's ability to live? And it was always interesting to watch people reject that approach because what they really wanted for him was not from people, was not kind of the hard-headed, here's what we do to mitigate response, but they want you to join in the kind of tenor of, the freak out of the existential crisis.

People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future.

Climate realists like Judith Curry, Steve Koonin, Michael Schellenberger, Alex Epstein, Roger Pike Jr., and Bjorn Lomborg have been saying this exact thing for years, that climate change is not an existential threat and that the singular obsession with carbon emissions has distracted us from solving real problems.

But those scientists and writers were ostracized.

They were censored on social media, protested, and in some cases, pushed out of their jobs.

Um, that's one of the most weird things to me about what's happening.

Like Bjorn Lomborg, during that h- oh, my God, heat, heat wave, we're all gonna die, kept posting stuff about, you know, like actually the number of forest fires is the lowest it's ever been, and the number of hurricanes in America is...

Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

And I would love to know what's going on with that shit.

yeah yeah exactly okay

uh Bjorn Lomborg will happily uh dive inside a scientific paper and pull it apart and point out errors and what he says is errors and statistical inscriptions he never pulls apart the economist just says like the Nobel Prize winning economist tells us X Y and Z you look at the work that Nordhaus has done it's garbage It's pulling apart a scientific paper.

You've got to really look to find something you might regard as a flaw.

Pulling apart Nordhaus's work, an eight-year-old child could do it.

Maybe it is the climate guilt, which has been a development of white culture spread around the world like a bacillus that has infected cultures everywhere.

And so, of course, they obsess about climate rather than, again, doing the sorts of things that people like the great Bjorn Lomborg talk about, about mitigating and... preparing for weather events, climactic events.

But there's another part of this, too, that the good senator ignores, and that's the role of what was happening upstream with the engineering projects done by China, which we know very little about, but which there is some talk about having potentially contributed to the severity of this disaster.

And yet we don't have any focus, we don't have any eyes on what they're doing, what they're building, dams that could have been constructed in ways that would have actually made downstream effects of these sorts of events, which happen regularly.

If we want to make the world better, let's focus on doing the best things first.

I'm Bjorn Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Consensus, visiting fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, and author of Best Things First for Prager University.

Thank you for watching this video.

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