Bjorn Lomborg: Energy, climate, and the fight for a better world

Welcome to The Times of Israel’s Lazar Focus. Each Friday, join host diplomatic correspondent Lazar Berman for a deep dive into what’s behind the news that spins the globe.

The US-Israeli war against Iran was initially about military capabilities — Iran’s nuclear program, its ballistic missiles, its armed proxies — but very quickly became a war about energy.

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It was Iran’s ability to choke global energy supplies that forced US President Donald Trump to effectively stop the war.

We also saw how central the flow of natural gas has been to the Ukraine war, as European countries scrambled to replace Russian gas to heat their homes and power their economies.

These complex challenges take place as the world tries to come up with a coherent climate policy, something it has struggled to do for decades.

Danish political scientist Dr. Bjorn Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, is one of the world’s most original thinkers on these issues.

“Energy is prosperity,” he stressed.

Affordable, available energy has led to humanity’s flourishing over the past two decades. Prosperity means you get less sick, you live longer, there is less child mortality, education is better, and you have more personal opportunities.

Global warming, he said, is a problem and will have mostly negative impacts. But we must ask ourselves whether we are pushing solutions that will end up doing more harm than the problem we are trying to solve.

The conversation, he stressed, must be based on what the UN climate panel actually says. It does not predict the demise of the human race. It does say it can cost 2-3% of global GDP by 2100, meaning it is a problem that needs addressing. But if your solution brings down GDP by 15%, then that is not the correct solution.

Climate innovation is the key, which is a low-cost way of getting green energy to be cheaper than fossil fuels.

For the foreseeable future, however, we are going to keep relying on fossil fuels. If current trends from 1971 remain the same, we are on track to get off fossil fuels in 1,000 years.

The point of public policy, he stressed, “is to leave the world better off in the future.

Lazar Focus can be found on all podcast platforms. This episode was produced by Gabriella Jacobs and video edited by Ari Schlacht.

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