Twenty years after Al Gore’s Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth made extreme climate scenarios the baseline assumption for public policy, media coverage, academic research, and school curricula across the western world, the United Nations has quietly walked back the RCP8.5 emissions pathway that underpinned much of that alarm. That pathway, which assumed humanity would quintuple global coal consumption from current levels, was never a realistic projection. It was a worst-case hypothetical that was sold as expected reality, generating thousands of academic studies, activist campaigns, and political arguments built on a foundation that essentially no serious energy economist believed would materialize.
Bjorn Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Consensus think tank and author of Best Things First, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to assess the implications of that admission and what a more rational approach to climate policy would look like.
Lomborg said the core point is correct: a lot of people had a lot of interest in pushing an extreme scenario that was unrealistic from the moment it was constructed. The justification that it served as a useful scientific tool because extreme scenarios make effects more visible has some technical validity, but the problem is it was not sold as a scientific tool. It was sold as the end of the world. That was a bad way to inform policy and a genuinely harmful way to frighten entire generations of children into climate anxiety, with some absorbing the message so thoroughly that they concluded it was unethical to have children in a world that was about to end. He said it is good that the field is returning to more realistic scenarios and that climate change can now be discussed as a real but manageable problem rather than an extinction event that overrides all other policy considerations.
He said the framing of climate change as a civilization-ending meteor hurtling toward Earth logically justified treating it as the only priority, subordinating every other human concern including poverty, hunger, disease, and access to clean water. That framing was wrong when it was introduced, and it is even more clearly wrong now. The world has real problems that kill people in large numbers today: indoor and outdoor air pollution, contaminated water, food insecurity, diseases that have proven solutions. Climate change will evolve as a problem over this century and deserves attention and resources, but it should be treated the way every other policy problem is treated, through cost-benefit analysis, priority-setting, and honest accounting of tradeoffs.
On what the appropriate response actually looks like, Lomborg said the history of solving environmental problems points clearly toward technological innovation rather than prohibition and mandates. He cited Los Angeles air pollution in the 1950s as the model: the city did not ban cars, it developed the catalytic converter, a relatively cheap device that eliminated most tailpipe emissions. The equivalent approach to climate change is making clean energy genuinely cheaper than fossil fuels, which solar and wind have not achieved because they do not produce power when it is dark or calm. The most promising paths are fourth-generation nuclear reactors, small modular reactors, and eventually fusion, all of which could provide reliable around-the-clock power at costs that would make the transition economically rational rather than requiring massive subsidies and mandates.
On the cost of the last twenty years of climate policy, Lomborg put the figure at sixteen trillion dollars globally, a number that represents both direct spending and the economic distortion of misdirecting research and investment away from the innovation approaches that would actually solve the problem toward the solar panels and wind turbines that have produced marginal results at enormous cost. He said this is a sunk cost in the sense that it cannot be recovered, but said spending more than two trillion dollars a year on current climate policy going forward is indefensible, and the proposals from Al Gore and others for tens or even hundreds of trillions toward net zero by 2050 without technological innovation are not only a catastrophic misallocation of resources but are politically impossible in any functioning democracy. He cited the European Union as a real-time illustration, noting that the EU is now moving to cut its carbon pricing mechanism in half because voters are unwilling to absorb the energy cost increases, and the pain threshold being encountered today is nowhere near what the net zero agenda would actually require.
He said the political reversals are coming and will accelerate, noting that candidates like Texas Senate candidate James Talarico, who introduced legislation to effectively ban the oil and gas industry, are already doing full reversals on energy policy. He predicted Gavin Newsom’s likely presidential campaign will face the same test given California’s 2035 ban on fossil fuel powered vehicles, and said the era of treating extreme climate scenarios as settled science that places all other policy questions subordinate is ending whether the people who built that framework are ready to acknowledge it or not.