Quotes of the Day

Danish statistician, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist (2001) and one of the TIME 100 Scientists & Thinkers of 2004, Bjorn Lomborg, 42, sat down with TIME's Laura Blue in London to discuss carbon cuts, his many critics, and his new book, Cool It: the Skeptical Environmentalist's guide to Global Warming, published in the U.S. in September 2007.

TIME: Why did you write Cool It?
Lomborg: Basically I think there's a need to have two conversations. One is what is the status of global warming. Is it a hoax? Is it a catastrophe? I try to say, well, it's neither. It's not a hoax, not a left-wing conspiracy to raise taxes or just natural variation, as many Republicans want to say in the U.S. On the other hand, it's not a not an unmitigated catastrophe, the end of civilization.

The other part is to get as realistic as possible about what we can actually do about climate change. Everybody seems to be so enamored by this idea we've got to cut emissions and we've got to cut them right now. And I understand why: because it makes us feel warm and fuzzy. We're doing something. Of course the real fact of the matter is we don't do very much. We promise a lot, but we don't actually do very much. And the honest-to-God reason is it's fairly expensive.

Rich people in rich countries will do a little, mainly for show. But most people in rich countries won't do very much, and certainly no one in the poor countries will do anything.

My point is — and this is very, very simple — instead of cajoling people into doing something that is very expensive, which is hard, why not actually make it much cheaper? Instead of convincing more and more people to buy expensive solar panels, for instance, why not invest in research and development so that these become much cheaper — competitive with fossil fuels, or maybe even cheaper. If we could get there, we wouldn't have to have this conversation.

You've talked before about the need to prioritize what we're doing — and that people set priorities implicitly even if they refuse to do it explicitly. What does that mean?
Well, obviously, in a perfect world we should fix all problems. We should fix climate change, and, preferably, tomorrow. We should also stop HIV/AIDS, malaria, malnutrition, and give clean water and sanitation to everyone, stop all civil wars. There are a lot of things in principle we should do, and I agree with all of those.

But, of course, we don't. We've had most of these problems for 50 years and we haven't fixed all of them. It seems reasonable to me to have a conversation: If we don't fix all problems tomorrow, can we at least talk about where we could do the most good first? Not ignoring the fact we should be doing all these things — but since we aren't, shouldn't we have a conversation about whether we can do lots of good or a little good?

But we do need to fix climate change?
Yes, we need to fix it throughout this century. This is just a very, very slow process, and one where we have to start thinking.

There must be some global warming investments that are a good deal.
It's very unlikely that zero dollars [per ton] would be the right carbon tax, but it's also very unlikely that $1,000 would be the right carbon tax. Any economist would say you should tax it at the marginal damage: that damage the extra ton of carbon dioxide does in the environment. The estimates we have show that the immediate damage impact is $2, and 90% of all studies published say the damage will be less than $14 per ton. That's pretty much the same in cents per gallon, roughly, so about two cents per gallon or 14 cents per gallon.

Then why do R&D rather than, say, taxing gasoline so much in the U.S. that it would change consumption patterns now?
Taxing would obviously change people's behavior. But it still has positive benefits to drive around. We could stop all traffic tomorrow if we just put a $1,000/gallon tax on gasoline. You've got to remember that fossil fuels have a lot of benefits. That's why we use them.

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. If we could increase that speed, we would make much more headway dealing with global warming simply because we would leave our kids and our grandkids, but especially the Chinese and the Indians, with much cheaper technology. Quite frankly right now they don't care about global warming because they care about feeding their kids and curing them from infectious diseases and stuff.

Are you surprised that your ideas have become so controversial?
In a sense, yes. Honestly, I think in 20 years we're going to look back at this and laugh. Not in the sense that we were on to something that wasn't a problem. But a little bit like people worried intensely about acid rain. Acid rain was a problem. It was not the end of the world, as it was very often said.

I'm making, I think, fairly simple points and they're not outrageous in any way. I'm simply pointing out we're promising a lot of stuff but we're not actually doing it. Maybe we should find a smarter way.

People have said you're ignoring some of the more dire predictions, cherry-picking your data if you will. Why do you suppose that is?
I'm always very, very surprised when people say I'm cherry-picking because I'm taking the median scenario from the U.N. climate panel. A lot of people say I'm consistently taking the most optimistic of points. I mean, by God, I'm saying what is the most likely — the median — temperature increase: 2.6 degrees C or 4.7 degrees F. Now it might get warmer than that. But it also might be cooler than that. This is the most likely outcome, what most people call the business-as-usual scenario. Likewise when I say "a one-foot rise in sea level," the U.N. says it's somewhere between half and 2 feet. It seems to me that saying 20, as Al Gore famously said, is cherry-picking.

I really think if it's an indication of anything, it's that the public debate has gone so far toward the one extreme that obviously it has to be 20 feet and anyone who says it's slightly less than that has got to be bonkers.

And why do you think that might be?
At the end of the day climate change is such a sexy topic. There's a question I very often get: Why isn't it ok to exaggerate a little bit? It's for a good cause. The problem is that's true for everything. Why isn't it O.K. to exaggerate about the state of health care? Everyone can come up with a good story to exaggerate for a good cause. But, then, democracies end up being screaming contests. Instead of having a rational conversation, we have a situation where everyone ends up screaming at the top of their lungs and what we listen to...are the ones who shout the loudest. That's unlikely to be a good way to prioritize.

You look at the median predictions of how global warming will affect the world. But a lot of people in climate change talk about meeting thresholds beyond which we would face drastic changes. If there were, say, a 15% risk of hitting one of these thresholds — even if it weren't the most likely scenario — shouldn't that change the calculation quite a bit?
Well it depends on whether we know where the thresholds are; when we don't it really becomes a distribution again. If you know where there's a specific threshold — if we pass this particular threshold, we all die — then it becomes fairly easy. We should definitely stop it. But if we don't know where these thresholds are, but we know that they are out there, it simply becomes more valuable to do something. That's absolutely true.

You talked about the taking the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) data. They put out a report earlier this year that concluded maybe it wouldn't be all that expensive to combat climate change. How do you take that?
Basically, what they came out and said was not that different from the numbers in my book: that for 3% of GDP you can cut emissions dramatically. Yeah. Hell, yeah.

I thought that it was something like 3% over the next two decades and that the annual GDP change was lower.
Yeah, it's 0.12%, as a lot of people like to point out. But that's an annual cumulated and that's why it accumulates into 3 percentage points by mid-century. The [0.12%] figure is a bit like selling people TVs and telling them what the hourly interest rate is going to be. That's a little bit of a cheater.

It means we'll be 3% less rich by 2030. We haven't spent anywhere near this amount in the last 50 years to do anything good in the world. So it seems a little naive to say now it's all cheap.

Why do you think people ascribe a political stance to your views? People assume you're conservative.
Which is so bizarre. For the longest time in Denmark I didn't want to say what I was politically. I thought it was irrelevant. I'm a self-described slight lefty in Denmark, which probably makes me incredibly left-wing in the U.S., so I'm very, very surprised. But I think this is because [climate change] has become so polarized in many ways, that it becomes either a hoax to Republicans, or to Democrats catastrophe. And what I like to say — and it's a little flip but I hope it's actually fairly true — is that I hope smartness is not a Republican or Democratic trait.

People have accused you sometimes of being a climate change denier, which you're not. Why do you think that is and how do you feel about it?
Well it's a curious thing that people react so strongly to me and people will go a fairly long way to make implications about why I'm saying what I'm saying, that I'm really just grudgingly conceding [climate change], that it's a third-generation denial strategy or something. I've always found that when you have to resort to psychological explanations of your opponents it must be because you don't have very good arguments.

There's a famous claim that somebody told me from Harvard Law School, that if you have a good case you should pound the case, but if you have a bad case you should pound the table.

• LAURA BLUE
• Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg sat down with TIME to discuss his new book, Cool It: the Skeptical Environmentalist's guide to Global Warming