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Bjørn Lomborg

Dedicated to finding ways for humankind to address its environmental impact

About

Gender: Male

Nationality: Denmark

Languages: English, French

Travels from: Denmark

Engagement Types

Topics

Table of Contents

Biography Highlights

Bjørn Lomborg’s quest for global environmental solutions and some controversial conclusions have seen him become a household name.

Biography

Dr. Lomborg researches contemporary issues and global challenges, and can build a provocative, thoughtful talk around any topics that he writes about, from climate change to energy to global development and beyond. He is a sought-after keynote speaker who is highly regarded for his dynamic and provocative presentations that challenge conventional thinking. His think-tank works with top economists, including several Nobel laureates, to identify the best solutions to global and national challenges. For this work, he has been named one of TIME magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World, and Foreign Policy repeatedly listed him as one of the “100 Top Global Thinkers”.

Dr. Lomborg is mostly known for his arguments against ineffective climate change policies. His best-known book is The Skeptical Environmentalist, which the Daily Telegraph called “probably the most important book on the environment ever written.” His most recent books are the best-selling False Alarm – How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet, and Best Things First – the 12 most efficient solutions for the world’s poorest and our global SDG promises named one of the best books of 2023 by both The Economist and Financial Times.

You can watch his talk From Feel-Good to High-Yield Good at The Longnow Foundation, and his Presidential lecture at Purdue University named The World, Energy, and Climate – getting our priorities straight.

Videos

Speaking videos

Media, podcast appearances and interviews

Popular Talks

The Skeptical Environmentalist

Available: Virtually

Simulation of strategies in collective action dilemmas

Available: Virtually

Scorecard for Humanity: The World from 1900 to 2050

Available: Virtually

Global Crises, Global Solutions

Available: Virtually

How to Make the World a Better Place

Available: Virtually

Limits to Growth: The fatal argument that put us on the wrong environmental track for decades

Available: Virtually

How to Make Your Efforts Count: Feeling Good vs. Doing Good

Available: Virtually

Books

False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet

Hurricanes batter our coasts. Wildfires rage across the American West. Glaciers collapse in the Artic. Politicians, activists, and the media espouse a common message: climate change is destroying the planet, and we must take drastic action immediately to stop it. Children panic about their future, and adults wonder if it is even ethical to bring new life into the world. Enough, argues bestselling author Bjorn Lomborg. Climate change is real, but it’s not the apocalyptic threat that we’ve been told it is. Projections of Earth’s imminent demise are based on bad science and even worse economics. In panic, world leaders have committed to wildly expensive but largely ineffective policies that hamper growth and crowd out more pressing investments in human capital, from immunization to education. False Alarm will convince you that everything you think about climate change is wrong — and points the way toward making the world a vastly better, if slightly warmer, place for us all.

Best Things First

World leaders have promised everything to everyone. But they are failing. The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals are supposed to be delivered by 2030. The goals literally promise everything, like eradicating poverty, hunger and disease; stopping war and climate change, ending corruption, fixing education along with countless other promises. This year, the world is at halftime for its promises, but nowhere near halfway. Together with more than a hundred of the world’s top economists, Bjorn Lomborg has worked for years to identify the world’s best solutions. Based on 12 new, peer-reviewed papers, forthcoming in Cambridge University Press’ Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis, this book highlights the world’s best policies.

The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World

The Skeptical Environmentalist challenges widely held beliefs that the environmental situation is getting worse and worse. The author, himself a former member of Greenpeace, is critical of the way in which many environmental organisations make selective and misleading use of the scientific evidence. Using the best available statistical information from internationally recognised research institutes, Bjørn Lomborg systematically examines a range of major environmental problems that feature prominently in headline news across the world. His arguments are presented in non-technical, accessible language and are carefully backed up by over 2500 footnotes allowing readers to check sources for themselves. Concluding that there are more reasons for optimism than pessimism, Bjørn Lomborg stresses the need for clear-headed prioritisation of resources to tackle real, not imagined problems. The Skeptical Environmentalist offers readers a non-partisan stocktaking exercise that serves as a useful corrective to the more alarmist accounts favoured by campaign groups and the media.

The Nobel Laureates Guide to the Smartest Targets for the World 2016-2030

In 2000, the Millennium Development Goals set a few, highly effective targets for the world, e.g. halve the proportion of poor and reduce childhood mortality by two-thirds. These targets have been a huge success. Now, the world must decide its targets for the next 15 years. The UN has proposed 169 targets, but not all are equally effective. Copenhagen Consensus has asked 60 teams of the world s top economists to weigh up the social, environmental and economic benefits and costs of 100+ targets across 22 global topics from Air Pollution and Education to Water. The world will spend $2.5 trillion on these targets 2016-2030. Picking the best targets can triple the benefits for the world s poorest. This book can help us choose better.

Cool It

Bjorn Lomborg argues that many of the elaborate and staggeringly expensive actions now being considered to meet the challenges of global warming ultimately will have little impact on the world’s temperature. He suggests that rather than focusing on ineffective solutions that will cost us trillions of dollars over the coming decades, we should be looking for smarter, more cost-effective approaches (such as massively increasing our commitment to green energy R&D) that will allow us to deal not only with climate change but also with other pressing global concerns, such as malaria and HIV/AIDS. And he considers why and how this debate has fostered an atmosphere in which dissenters are immediately demonized.

How to Spend $75 Billion to Make the World a Better Place

The world faces myriad challenges yet – we are constrained by scarce resources. In the 21 st Century, how do we deal with natural disasters, tackle global warming, achieve better nutrition, educate children…and address countless other urgent global issues? If you want to change the world, this inspiring and entertaining book is for you. Bjorn Lomborg presents smart solutions to twelve global problems, and shows how we could spend $75 billion to produce the most benefit and prioritize those problems. Featuring the cutting edge research of more than sixty eminent economists, including several Nobel Laureates, produced for the Copenhagen Consensus, How to spend 75 billion to make the world a better place will inform, enlighten and motivate actions to make our world a better place.

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