Bjorn Lomborg

The second thing is, if you want to do something about global warming, you have to think much more long-term. There is something wrong with saying we should start using renewables now, while they are still incredibly expensive. ”

We have to be aware that the scientific community throws up tons of different hypotheses and at a certain point we'll find out who was right and who was wrong. But we have to go with the best information right now, which I would claim to be the IPCC reports. ”

I tentatively believe in a god. I was brought up in a fairly religious home. I think the world is compatible with reincarnation, karma, all that stuff. ”

A review was published in Nature, very scathing, essentially calling me incompetent, though they didn't use that word. I am putting a reply on my Web site in a few days, where I go through their arguments, paragraph by paragraph. ”

Even if every major government were to slap huge taxes on carbon fuels - which is not going to happen - it wouldn't do much to halt climate change any time soon. What it would do is cost us hundreds of billions - if not trillions - of dollars, because alternative energy technologies are not yet ready to take up the slack. ”

The saddest fact of climate change - and the chief reason we should be concerned about finding a proper response - is that the countries it will hit hardest are already among the poorest and most long-suffering. ”

If we invest in researching and developing energy technology, we'll do some real good in the long run, rather than just making ourselves feel good today. But climate change is not the only challenge of the 21st century, and for many other global problems we have low-cost, durable solutions. ”

The only thing that will really change global warming in the long run is if we radically increase the speed with which we get alternative technologies to deal with climate change. ”

For the longest time in Denmark I didn't want to say what I was politically. I thought it was irrelevant. ”

To some, a cap-and-trade system might sound like a neat approach where the market sorts everything out. But in fact, in some ways it is worse than a tax. With a tax, the costs are obvious. With a cap-and-trade system, the costs are hidden and shifted around. For that reason, many politicians tend to like it. But that is dangerous. ”