Bjorn Lomborg
11/12/2010

The upcoming climate summit in Cancun promises more proposals that ignore economic reality, writes Lomborg. World-wide public spending on research and development for clean energy technologies is a paltry $2 billion a year. Increasing this to $100 billion a year could be a game-changer. Not only would it be almost twice as cheap as the $180 billion a year cost of fully implementing Kyoto, but the effect of this kind of spending would be hundreds of times greater. Lomborg argues that this should not be our only response to global warming. We should also invest considerably more in adaptation to global warming’s effects and research geo-engineering technologies as a potential backstop.

Lomborg is director of the Copenhagen Consensus, a think tank, and author of “Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming” (Knopf, 2007). His new film, “Cool It,” opens in US theaters nationwide today.

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