Incorrigible Lomborg: Defending the right of rich people to pollute [2]
The Disingenuous Environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg [7] has once again celebrated a public epiphany [8] on climate change, bringing him. once again, to the conclusion that the globe is warming, that humans are to blame and that we - especially we rich people - shouldn’t do anything about it.
In Lomborg’s latest feint, he suckered some reporter at London’s Financial Times into reporting that he has broken common cause with the “climate sceptics” and called for an a global agreement on climate change in this December’s Kyoto negotiations in Copenhagen.
But if you read the details, his position is the same as ever: that it would be a “mistake” to try to get rich countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. Lomborg’s choice is to concentrate on every other thing - and especially to think about ignoring the problem in the short term, putting our energies into adaptation and “weighing up whether emission cuts are cheaper to do now or later.”
This is insincere drivel, typical of everything that Lomborg has been saying [9] about climate change for years. He has positioned himself as an “environmentalist” - as someone who acknowledges the danger of climate change. But he has then built carefully contrived arguments that totally ignore the cumulative nature of the climate change threat. His “let’s-do’nothing-soon” strategy also serves perfectly the agenda of the big energy producers - and the think tanks that so frequently hire Lomborg as a guest speaker - all of whom want to maintain the profitable status quo, leaving the problem to be solved by developing nations or by future generations.
There is nothing new in this “new” position. It’s straight out of the Exxon playbook and the Financial Times should be embarrassed to have been led by the nose to reporting this as if it is a legitimate update.
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