What’s the deal on cutting carbon emissions?

Bjørn Lomborg is a controversial environmental figure. A Danish professor (Ph.D. in political science) who heads the Copenhagen Consensus Institute, Lomborg has attacked the “consensus” view that the way to combat global warming (now called “climate change”) is to reduce carbon emissions. According to Lomborg, “If we spent $800 billion over the next 90 years solely on the Gore solution of mitigating carbon emissions, we would rein in temperature increases by just 0.3 degrees by the end of this century.”

Lomborg even has the nerve to say wind, solar, geothermal, and wave are “incredibly inefficient.” He instead favors a targeted use of money on developing second-generation biofuel from biomass, investing in energy efficiency, fission and fusion, and carbon capture and storage (for coal, presumably).

It’s hard just to dismiss Lomborg. He believes climate change represents a serious threat to the planet. He believes climate change is a human-caused problem. He’s Danish, he is gay (maybe, maybe not, making him more sincerely leftist), he’s writing in Esquire, a decidedly liberal publication. So we should pay attention, when Lomborg says:

When we calculate the costs and benefits of [my] alternative solution, we discover that each time we invest a dollar, we create benefits worth $16 — at least 18 times and possibly 400 times better than the Gore approach. This is because the money spent on research and development will make alternatives to fossil fuels cheaper sooner, and make for a genuine transition to a low-carbon future, with all its benefits accruing sooner and at lower costs.