Whether it’s publishing his own misleading analyses of the Paris agreement, or deceiving people about someone else’s report, Bjorn Lomborg doesn’t have a particularly trustworthy history.
For example, his industry-funded organization, the Copenhagen Consensus Center, lists its contact address as a mail forwarding service to a P.O. Box in Massachusetts (a bit far from Denmark, no?). And before he was called out on it, his so-called consensus panel of experts, whose opinions form the basis of the group’s work, claimed to include Nobel-winning economists who, as it turned out, were dead. This is all to say that Lomborg’s organization is not a center, is not in Copenhagen, and doesn’t really represent any sort of real consensus.
With that in mind, we turn to Lomborg’s op-ed in this Sunday’s New York Post, where he continues to misrepresent climate science. Specifically, he talks about the study on carbon pricing and food security we flagged a few weeks back. The study’s authors said specifically that it shouldn’t be used to argue against climate action, but should instead show the need for comprehensive policies that don’t treat a price on carbon as a single silver bullet.
Guess what Lomborg does with it?
If you guessed “exactly what the authors warned against,” you’re right! Instead of fighting climate change, which according to his incorrect interpretation of the study would make more people go hungry, Lomborg suggests we revive the Doha free trade deal. This recommendation comes as a result of research Lomborg’s P.O. Box Consensus Center was commissioned to do. Who commissioned that research? We don’t know. But we’re definitely totally sure that if it were an entity with a stake in the trade deal, Lomborg and/or the Post would disclose such pertinent info…
Lomborg also uses Bangladesh as an example, claiming that if they forgo coal development, it would cost them $50 billion, compared to only a $100 million climate benefit. However, considering that Bangladesh is one of the lowest-lying countries in the world and is already experiencing massive problems from sea level rise, what good would that $50 billion be if the country’s under water?
We’ll spare you the neoliberal critique of Lomborg’s “get rich and die trying” approach, and instead turn to a new study that reaffirms his blunder. For someone who claims to care about the poor, it’s odd that Lomborg fails to notice studies showing how climate change makes it harder for people to stay well-fed.
Case in point: a new study out in Nature yesterday crunches the numbers on how elevated CO2 levels reduce the concentrations of certain nutrients in food crops. Under 550 ppm conditions, “protein, iron and zinc contents that are reduced by 3–17%.” That may not sound huge, but with millions of people worldwide already not getting enough to eat, conditions expected for 2050 would mean “an additional 175 million people to be zinc deficient and an additional 122 million people to be protein deficient.”
The study’s author, Harvard’s Sam Meyers, points out in an op-ed that it’s “the poorest, who have been least responsible for elevating CO2 levels” who will suffer the impacts the most. Climate change reducing nutrition in food crops means “more children dying of pneumonia, malaria, diarrhea, and other infections as their immune systems are compromised by lack of zinc” and “more women dying in childbirth and infants failing to survive because of iron deficiency.”
But according to Lomborg, those people should care more about free trade policies than climate change. For years now, he’s said the same thing over and over: there’s always something else besides climate action that we should be doing.
Get a new schtick already man, because debunking you over and over is really getting Lomboring.
Top Climate and Clean Energy Stories:
