Bjørn Lomborg: The climate contrarian who puts poverty first

Under Ajay Banga’s presidency, the World Bank has unequivocally added climate change to its anti-poverty mandate, and the debate over whether the bank can do both is moot. Or is it? Bjørn Lomborg has become a well-known climate contrarian, emphatically refuting conventional wisdom that climate change is an immediate existential threat and that it cannot be divorced from the “intertwined” — one of Banga’s favorite terms — crisis of poverty. Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Consensus think tank, says not to kid yourself that you can — or should — do both, arguing that people in the low- and middle-income world care more about their kids not starving to death, getting an education, having a roof over their heads, and, yes, having more money than having electric cars or solar minigrids. “In a perfect world where we could do everything, we should do everything. But in the real world, we have to confront the fact that we end up making priorities, and we end up spending money on some things and that takes away from other things,” he told Devex at the World Bank-International Monetary Fund annual meetings in Marrakech, Morocco. “It’s not rocket science. There’s only one pot of money.” Ahead of those meetings, Lomborg wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed in which he lambasted the “unholy alliance of green activists and climate-anxious politicians” who push the bank “to devote a plethora of new resources to climate change.” He cited the Group of the 20 major economies’ report that urges the World Bank and other development organizations to mobilize an additional $3 trillion in annual spending — most of it, he claims, toward fighting climate change. “Almost as an afterthought, it suggests that a fraction of the money should go to everything else, such as schooling, health and food. It’s unlikely the world will raise anywhere close to $3 trillion. Unfortunately, experience indicates that much of what does get raised will go toward climate. Development funding is already being raided for climate spending,” he wrote. Lomborg is not alone in his thinking. In a recent blog post, Charles Kenny, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, slammed high-income countries that claim “no tradeoffs” in climate mitigation and development funding, “despite the fact there is an obvious tradeoff between financing bed nets in Liberia and a solar power plant in Brazil if you are a child in Liberia.” But other experts say that’s why it’s key for the bank to raise new funding for both climate change and poverty alleviation, although the appetite for actually coughing up fresh money — a capital increase — is questionable, at best. On that note, Lomborg assails what he perceives as the hypocrisy of higher-income countries that decry climate change but do little to put their money where their mouth is — punting the tough, and expensive, task of mitigating greenhouse gas emissions to the lowest-income people who barely emit them. “We’re living in a world where most rich people say climate is incredibly important. And then you ask them, ‘So do you mind if you have to pay more for your petrol?’ And suddenly they’re like, ‘Well, actually, I might not vote for you. … And so it makes sense that you're saying, ‘Oh, why don't we make the poor do all this green stuff?’” he said. Lomborg says the less privileged “would like to live in a world of plenty where they don’t have to worry about poverty, where they have cheap and affordable and reliable energy. And eventually, hopefully, that will be something that we can also make green. But since we’re struggling with us rich people [doing that], it’s sort of presumptuous to say, ‘Oh, but the poor people can do that.’” “It is unconscionable for us to say we got rich on fossil fuels, but you can’t,” he added, noting that high-income countries still get almost 80% of their energy from fossil fuels. A climate ‘false alarm?’ While Lomborg’s charges of Western hypocrisy resonate with many lower-income countries, his climate skepticism — some say denial — is far more controversial, especially in the face of climate turbo-charged disasters such as the devastating floods in Libya. Lomborg — author of “False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet” — acknowledges that climate change is real, but he argues it shouldn’t come ahead of development priorities that, if addressed, would make people more resilient to natural disasters. “If climate change is the end of the world, if this is a sort of meteor hurtling towards Earth, and we’re all gonna be extinguished like the dinosaurs, then nothing else matters; we should just stop everything we do on poverty … and everyone should just be focused on staring that asteroid away,” he said. “But that’s not the case. The real reality is … the world gets slightly less better because of climate change.” What he means is that under some scenarios, the world will dramatically improve over the next century. “Climate change will merely slow that progress slightly. Hunger will fall dramatically over the coming decades, but with climate change, it will decline a smidgen slower,” he wrote in the Wall Street Journal. Not that simple But Lomborg’s critics — and he has quite a few — say he oversimplifies the data and that the costs of climate change are already here — and they’re sky-high. For instance, Lloyd’s of London and the Cambridge Centre for Risk Studies recently presented research showing that under a “plausible increase” in extreme weather events linked to climate change, global economic losses could reach $5 trillion. Then there’s the human toll. The World Health Organization estimates that 7 million people die of air pollution each year — more than the deaths attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic. Meanwhile, according to a study by Purdue University, billions of people, especially in cities, could struggle to survive in the face of “moist heat extremes [that] lie outside the bounds of past human experience.” That gets to the increasingly ominous unknowns of climate change. “Not since the dawn of humanity has there been anything like this,” wrote Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz in a New York Times critique of “False Alarm.” “The models use the ‘best estimate’ of impacts, but as we learn more about climate change these best estimates keep getting revised, and, typically, in only one direction — more damage and sooner than had been expected.” And as we approach what could be the hottest year on record, recent catastrophes illustrate the salient, present-day reach of climate change, many experts say. “The connection of human development back to climate is actually a very concrete one,” Mark Suzman, CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, told Devex on the sidelines of the World Bank-IMF meetings. “Who is most affected right now by climate change?” he asked. “It is the people in the tropics, where you’ve had a five-year drought which just ended in the Horn of Africa, which literally threw tens of millions of people into food insecurity. It’s the third of the country in Pakistan that was displaced by the unprecedented floods a year ago. And the people who live there are largely smallholder farmers and their families dependent on agriculture for livelihoods, nutrition, income to put their kids in school.” A more nuanced debate Suzman touches on a different debate within climate change circles — not whether the effects have been exaggerated, as Lomborg claims, but rather whether the world is doing enough to help lower-income countries adapt to climate change, versus mitigating emissions. “For example, we in the Gates Foundation invested heavily in research into drought- and flood-resistant crops of livestock, and how you can have better, more efficient irrigation,” Suzman said. But a big problem is that adaptation measures, like stronger seawalls and elevated roadways, aren’t as profitable to private investors as solar and wind projects typically are. “And so what we would like to see is what the global community has claimed for a long time: There should be an equal focus on adaptation and mitigation,” Suzman said. “But if you actually look at where does the money go, including the private money, it's currently a sort of 90-to-10 ratio of mitigation to adaptation. So I think one of the ways to connect that … climate and development are not opposing forces, they actually can be synergistic, is if you focus on the specific climate impacts that disproportionately affect the poor.” It’s a nuanced argument that perhaps Lomborg could appreciate given his posture that climate conversations tend to be a zero-sum game. “It sort of consists of a lot of people who say climate is the end of the world, so this is everything that matters, or it’s nothing at all, and we should just ignore it all. The reality is that somewhere in between … for most people, there are more important things where you can do a lot more good at a very low cost,” he said. “But we, and especially rich people who can actually afford to care about many different things, should be investing a lot more in green energy R&D. The simple point is, we’re never going to solve climate change when it requires a lot of sacrifice,” he argued, adding that ideally, he’d “love the world to do all the right stuff, but we’re happy and we’ll absolutely settle for making it slightly less wrong. So I’m hoping that I can help make the world make decisions so we are slightly less wrong. That's really where I'm getting at.”