Read the full transcript of Danish political scientist and author Bjorn Lomborg’s talk at The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) 2025.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
BJORN LOMBORG: Thank you. It’s great to be here. They’ve just given me this very, very simple question, how do we get back growth?
This is my answer. Fundamentally, we need to get back growth and one of the important ways that we can do that is by making sure we stop making bad climate policies and we do that by stopping the climate doomism.
The Importance of Energy for Economic Growth
I’m going to walk you through some of these things that are incredibly important. We have this idea that we can get by with less energy, but actually this is not what we see. If you take the amount of energy that countries have out this axis and how rich they are, it’s very clear that you have India here, you have China here, you have the U.S. up here. It’s just simply very, very clear. The more energy you have, the more likely it is that you’re going to be rich or to put it differently, to get rich, you need lots of energy and to stay rich, you need lots of energy. There’s just simply no low energy, high income countries.
That means we need to get a lot more energy, not less energy. But one of the problems with climate policies is they drive up our prices and often dramatically so, which means it’s much harder to keep using energy.
The Impact of Climate Policies on Energy Prices
So take the UK where we are right now. If you look at the energy price, so this is from the International Energy Agency, the best agency, the best data that we have that shows what is the electricity price for the UK, both for industry, for households, it’s inflation adjusted to 2024 pence, not in pounds. What you see here is over the last century or so, prices came down because we got better and better at producing electricity. But since 2003, or the early 2000s, prices have gone up.
They first doubled and then they tripled. British people now pay three times as much as they did just 20 years ago. Most of this is because of climate. Now there’s obviously also some Ukraine in here, but the point is that’s because we relied on cheap Russian gas to pull us through.
That turned out to be a really bad idea. But of course, maybe the UK should have been fracking, then it wouldn’t have had this problem.
The fundamental point here is we’re only going to get this right if we stop having incredibly wasteful policies. Just notice, we actually do know another future, another possibility was available because if you look at the US price, it was pretty stable all across the last 30 years. It needn’t have been this that the UK is now spending about 2% more of its GDP every year on electricity. That’s a huge cost and an unnecessary cost. Of course, this drives down consumption. The UK actually uses less and less electricity per person since the early 2000s. Not surprisingly, if you have to pay a lot of money for electricity, you stop using it.
Actually, China has gone past per person the UK. The world is just about to do that for the UK. Of course, the US just uses way more electricity. Why? Because you have cheap electricity. The UK has incredibly costly electricity. Crucially, and that’s of course what we’re talking about, it drives down growth. If you look at the growth rate in rich countries, the OECD, we used to have growth at about 4% per person in the 1960s. In the 1990s, it was down to about 2%. Now, it’s barely above 1%.
Not all of this is because of climate policy, but certainly part of it towards the end is driven by climate policy. Again, if we start getting this better, how do we get growth back?
The Need for Abundant and Cheap Energy
We need abundant and cheap energy. We know this. This is how you drive better and higher growth. That means we need to address the climate concern. There’s a real climate problem, but there’s also a lot of people incredibly worried about climate, and those are real too. We need to address this. This is how we do it. First of all, we need to tell people, yes, climate change is a real problem.
It’s not the end of the world. We need to tell them and show them that the current climate policies are not working. Then, we need to fix this with innovation, fix it with adaptation, and fix it, surprisingly, with economic growth. I’ll walk into each one of these, and then I’ll shut up.
Climate Change: A Problem, Not the End of the World
First of all, climate is not the end of the world. We believe, and we’re being told that this is the all-encompassing catastrophe of the world. This is an existential problem. It’s not. It’s a problem. We know some of the data, so I’m going to share some of this, and I hope you’ll share it with all your very worried friends. We should certainly tell this to our kids. Take a look at how many people die from climate-related disasters, floods, droughts, storms, and wildfires. 150 years ago, we estimate that about 5 million people died from these climate-related disasters. In the 1870s, 5 million people died each and every year. This is an unfathomably large number of people dying.
In the 1920s, about half a million people died from climate-related disasters each and every year. In the 1970s, half a century later, about 55,000 people died. Today, less than 10,000 people die each and every year. Climate change is not this all-encompassing fear that’s going to drive us all to death. It’s not the existential problem we’re talking about.
We’ve seen a decline of 500 times. Of course, at the same time, global population is more than quintupled. We’ve seen a dramatic decline in the risk of dying from climate-related disasters. We are better off, not worse off.
The Reality of Current Climate Policies
And we also need to tell people that our current climate policies don’t work. You know how you’re constantly being told that solar and wind is incredibly cheap? We’ve all seen this graph of how solar and wind has come down dramatically over the last couple of decades, and it’s now cheaper than ever. And many people will tell you that solar and wind is some of the cheapest energy in the world, some of the cheapest electricity in the world. They’re technically correct, but they are dramatically misleading you. Why? Because it’s only cheaper when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. When it’s not, it’s the most expensive form of energy in the world because you can’t buy it for any amount of money.
Solar and wind is not cheap when you need electricity 24-7. How do we show that? Well, take a look at this graph. We have the percent of solar and wind and electricity out the x-axis, so how much solar and wind are you producing out of your total consumption?
And up this axis, you get the price. You would imagine, as you believe the green rhetoric, that as you get more and more solar and wind, this cheap energy forms, you’d get cheaper and cheaper energy. You’d also be incredibly wrong. We have data for almost 70 countries. This is what it shows. Very, very clearly that the more solar and wind you get, the more costly it gets. So you have China and India down here with little solar and wind and very low prices.
You have US with a little more solar and wind and higher prices. You have the EU up there with much more solar and wind and much higher prices. And then, of course, you have those frontrunners, the United Kingdom, Germany, Netherlands, that have huge amounts of solar and wind and enormously high prices. And I’m sorry to say, my native Denmark does the very best or very worst, right?
It has the most solar and wind and the very highest prices. It is just not true when you look at actual data that solar and wind is cheaper and cheaper. It makes electricity more and more expensive. So we’ve got to recognize this is a green fantasy.
There’s no countries down here when people tell you that more and more solar means cheaper and cheaper. They’re just simply talking against the evidence. We don’t see that there’s no nation that has achieved this. And we need to tell it as it is.
So we need to recognize that our current policies are going to be incredibly costly. Net zero will cost so much for the world, we estimate it will cost about $27 trillion. Not once, but every year throughout the 21st century. For the EU, it’s going to cost 10.5% of its GDP by 2050, or about 3.3 trillion euros each and every year. This is more than the total cost of all core government services together. Just to give you a sense of proportion, the EU right now spends about 0.8 trillion euros on education. That’s anything from kindergarten to universities. It spends 1.26 trillion on health. It spends 0.13 trillion on environment, 0.22 trillion on defense, and another 0.22 trillion on police law, courts, and prisons.
All of this is 2.6 trillion euros. We’re proposing on green to spend much more, 3.3 trillion euros each and every year. This is both impossible, it’ll drive us bankrupt, or at least close to, and it’s not going to happen.
The Reality of Fossil Fuels
The last bit I just want to talk about is how everybody tells us we’re all going to go off fossil fuels. You’re being told that fossil fuels is left in the past, we need to get on the renewables train, the train is leaving the station, and we all need to get on board before it’s done. There is no train, there’s no station, there’s not even a snack bar. This is not happening. If you look at the actual data, from 1971 until today, yes it has gone down slightly from 87% to 81%, but it’s absolutely ridiculous to believe that we’re going to go to zero in 2050.
It’s not going to happen. What is likely to happen is a slow decline. If we take the fastest decline, it’ll probably be done in, I don’t know, four centuries?
More likely, we’ll be done in nine centuries. We need to recognize the reality of the world because that makes us better able to deal with this.
Getting Growth Back: Sensible Climate Policies
So how do we get growth back? Well, we need sensible policies on climate. First of all, we need to tell it as it is.
We need to end the scare. We need to end our kids being scared wild. So one of the things is global fire. I’ve shown you also how fewer and fewer people die. Global fire, we’re constantly told that there’s more and more fire in the world. No, there’s not. We have very good data that shows we’ve actually seen a declining fraction of the world burning each year. We’ve gone from about 4.2% down to about 3%. And since the late 1990s, we’ve had satellites circling the world every single 24-7, picking up on all fires. And what they show, very different from what you hear, is a decline of 25% or more. It’s not such that the world is burning more and more. It’s burning less and less. The biggest or the lowest burn was in 2022.
The second lowest burn was in 2024. We need to tell people this. Of course, why? This is because people don’t like fire and so they actually make sure that there’s less fire. This is not rocket science. We know how to do this. We do this all the time with adaptation.
A Manageable Problem
We need to recognize that a sensible climate policy is one that recognizes climate change as a problem, but one that’s manageable. Economists will tell you it’s going to cost 2-3% by the end of the century. That’s not nothing, but it’s certainly not near 100%. And we’re going to fix it with low-carbon R&D. So deliver much more green innovation.
We could increase it five-fold. It would cost about $100 billion. It’s still just 5% of what we’re currently spending, of the $2 trillion we’re spending on climate policies every day. And innovation is the way that we fix all global problems. Remember, we didn’t fix other problems in the world by telling everybody, “I’m sorry, sir, would you mind to be poorer and colder and less prosperous for decades on end to fix this problem?”
People are not going to say yes to that. What they did do in the past and what we will do in the future is to say we’re going to solve problems through innovation. If we get cheaper green energy, say fourth-generation nuclear and a lot of other possible options, if we find green energy that’s cheaper than fossil fuels, everyone will switch, not just rich, well-meaning Brits and Americans, but also the Chinese, the Indians, and the Africans. This solves climate change and it’s a boom for the planet.
Adaptation and Growth
We also fix climate policy with adaptation. Take for instance sea level rise, which is a real problem. We know how to do that. We’ve known how to do it since the Babylonians. You do this with dikes and levees. We estimate that we can fix with dikes and levees about 187 million people from getting flooded by the end of the century, whereas incredibly expensive carbon cuts can save maybe 5,000. We should do adaptation first and then finally, and that gets us back to the track and what we’re talking about here today, we need much more growth. It sounds a little surprising but if you think about it, poor people are incredibly harmed and vulnerable from climate change. If a hurricane hits Guatemala, it kills a lot of people.
It disrupts the economy. But remember, poor people are harmed by everything. They’re incredibly vulnerable to bad health care, bad education, all the other things that afflict poor societies, whereas prosperous people are not in the same way. If the same hurricane hits Florida, sure, it’s going to kill some people and it’s going to make some disruption, but then Florida moves on. And of course, prosperous people are much more resilient against all of the problems. That’s why growth matters so much.
The Impact of Lower Energy Prices
And so I’m just going to share with you what we do know, namely if we can get energy prices down by say 30%, which is certainly a conservative estimate, by having less wasteful climate policies, research shows this is going to up the growth rate by 0.75 percentage points. Now that doesn’t sound like very much, but if you actually look at the data for the OECD, yes we’ve had growth over the last half century and 1% growth will leave your kids and grandkids a little better off, yeah.
But if you actually do it 1.75, we will be much better off. And of course if we look into the future, if we look to 2100, which I’m sorry, we had a very, very cute animation, but it didn’t quite work, but what you get here is an incredible improvement in opportunity per person across the world. We can, with bad climate policy, delay prosperity for a generation, but we could also put it the other way. If we get good climate policy, if we get smarter, if we focus back on growth, we can move forward the time when we get prosperity by a generation. You could also on current policy, call the blue line America and the red line Europe.
Conclusion
The fundamental point here is to say how do we get growth back? We need to get abundant energy, we need to get rid of wasteful climate policy. We do that by telling people, look, this is a problem, it’s not the end of the world. We need to recognize our current climate policies are impoverishing us and we can do much better. The way we do much better, it’s fix it at 5% of the cost with innovation, it’s fix it with adaptation, and it’s fix it with growth. That’s how we get growth back.
Thank you very much ladies and gentlemen. Thank you very much.
