"If We Focus On All The Things That We Can't Fix Very Well, We Very Easily Forget All The Things We Can Fix": Bjørn Lomborg On India, Climate, And Getting Priorities Right

Bjørn Lomborg has spent nearly three decades making the argument that the world is getting better.

The data proves it, and our collective panic about the future, especially the spectre of climate change, is causing us to spend enormous sums doing very little good while ignoring the problems we could solve cheaply and immediately.

The Danish author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, Cool It, False Alarm and Best Things First spoke to Swarajya in an interview that ranged from climate policy and nuclear energy to education reform, tuberculosis, and whatever happened to that hole in ozone layer above Australia.

What follows is an edited transcript of that conversation.

Arush Tandon: Thank you, Dr Bjørn Lomborg, for joining us and taking the time to speak with Swarajya. My first question to you is rather a simple one. Is the world ending?

Bjørn Lomborg: Very likely, no. Obviously we don't know — there are risks that could actually happen — but fundamentally it looks like the world not only is not ending, but it's getting better and better in almost all aspects.

This is obvious if you think about how your parents and grandparents lived. It's obvious in most of the basic things that we see: we live much longer, we have higher incomes, we're better educated, our kids die less, we have much more opportunity.

Now, there are still lots of problems in the world. Remember, you can both say the world is getting better and still say there are tons of stuff that we need to fix. India obviously has lots and lots of problems still to address, but the world is not ending and things are going in the right direction.

Arush Tandon: You have said that you were a former Greenpeace member yourself. What was that one event, or that one data point, or that one experience which made you change your views?

Bjørn Lomborg: I should just say I was a member of Greenpeace in the sense that I got all their magazines, I was a paying member — I wasn't out in a rubber boat. I was more like your average suburban, slightly left-leaning kind of guy. I had the backpack, I had the badges on my backpack, I had the poster on my wall — supposedly of an Indian chief saying only when they fell the last tree and caught the last fish would they realise they can't eat gold. It turns out that was a fake.

The main point here is not to dismiss Greenpeace. I'm glad that an organisation like Greenpeace exists. We should definitely hear about problems. But we shouldn't only believe Greenpeace. And I think that was my realisation — that Greenpeace operates on the idea that the world is getting ever worse, that we're over-polluting, that we're somehow destroying the future in many different ways. And that's not generally true.

The conversion came when I read an article in Wired magazine back in 1997 — almost 30 years ago. An interview with an American economist called Julian Simon, who said things are getting better. And I was like, no you're wrong. But then he said one thing: go check the data yourself.

I taught statistics at the university. I always told my students you think a lot of things, but a lot of these are not true. You've got to actually check the data yourself. So I thought, that's a fun challenge. Obviously he's (Julian Simon) wrong, but let's show him wrong. We actually bought his book. I started a study group where we were going to go through UN data and show how wrong he was. And that was where I realised, my goodness, a lot of things have actually gotten better.

What you know about the world is mostly shaped by what you read in the media and on websites and TV. Their job is not to inform you well about the whole state of the world. Their job, explicitly, is to tell you a curated story of the worst things that happened in the last 24 hours.

They do that really, really well, but they fail to mention all the good things that have happened. One good example: over the last 25 years, the world has lifted well over a billion people out of poverty. India is a very large part of that story. Every day for the last 25 years, 138,000 people were lifted out of poverty every 24 hours. So every newspaper in the world could, every day for 25 years, have written on their cover: last night, 138,000 people were lifted out of poverty. They never do. Most people actually think poverty has increased, which it hasn't, because of economic growth.

It's important to recognise that when you read stories in the paper, you almost exclusively read negative news. That's also what Greenpeace gives you. It's not wrong — we should know about these things — but we should also know that the overall trends are very, very different.

That's what changed my mind. That's why I stopped paying my dues to Greenpeace and why I started saying we can look at the world in a smarter, better way. Things are getting better. That doesn't mean there are no problems, but now we can stop being panicky and start talking about what works.

Arush Tandon: You've also said that when we conflate real world problems with their blown-up versions, it makes it harder to tackle and solve those real problems. Can you give an example?

Bjørn Lomborg: You may know that the UN set out to set global goals back in 2015. These are called the Sustainable Development Goals.

They're a pathway, if you will, of all the things that we should do. It was a great idea. I really tried to help influence it. We worked with more than 100 of the world's top economists to show them what you should prioritise.

Of course, they ended up promising everything to everyone. Get rid of poverty, but also get rid of war and climate change and unemployment and everything else. You can't disagree with that sentiment — we should do all things. But in the real world, we're not going to be able to do it.

If we focus on all the things that we can't fix very well, we very easily forget all the things we can fix.

There are 169 targets in the Global Goals, which shows you how unwieldy it is.

When we held a large public event in Denmark with tens of thousands of people, asking what they wanted to focus on, almost everyone said climate change. Absolutely, climate change is a problem and it's one of many things we should be focused on. But poverty, hunger, bad education, lack of equality for girls and boys — all these other things got ignored because all these rich Danes forgot to talk about them because we were so obsessed with this one problem.

The issue with climate change is not that it's not a problem. It is that it's a very, very hard and costly way to help very, very little. Unlike some other issues — malnutrition, maternal and newborn death, tuberculosis — these are very simple things that still afflict a very large part of the world. India knows these issues well. You have more than 300,000 people who die from tuberculosis every year. You have more than 300,000 mothers and children who die around (or after) childbirth. There are lots of very big problems that we could solve incredibly easily.

My point is: if you start thinking about this rationally, it becomes a lot easier to say, 'why don't we do the things where we can do a lot of good for little money first, before we do the things where we spend a lot of money to do a little good?'

We only get to that point when we stop being scared witless. If you think the world is going to end, obviously you're going to run around and say we have to do everything and we have to do the climate thing because, as people will tell you, this is the end of the world. If it was true, that's a correct analysis. But it's not. It's one of many problems. We need to get a better sense of where we should spend our resources.

Arush Tandon: Do you think a major part of your career and your struggle has just been trying to introduce common sense in a world where either glamour or pure panic is what drives the narrative and the choices?

Bjørn Lomborg: Yes, that's very well put. If we focus on what politicians tell us, they will tell us there's a climate catastrophe, or a health catastrophe, or a security catastrophe — vote for me and I'll spend a lot of money to fix that. It makes total political sense, but it's probably not the right way to think about how we should spend resources.

I try to make the simple point which economics in general tries to make: we have limited resources, you can't spend money more than once, spend it where it does the most good first. We work with more than 300 of the world's top economists, seven Nobel laureates in economics, to estimate where you can spend a dollar or a rupee and do the most good. It's essentially cost-benefit analysis.

This is not rocket science. You and I and everybody else does this in our private lives. We know that we can't do all the things we want. We estimate how much is that vacation going to cost and how much good is it going to do me, and what about fixing the roof. We make sensible choices. We should do exactly the same on a public level. But unfortunately we very often don't, precisely because we're scared witless.

Arush Tandon: Our research showed that scientists have been quite harsh on your books and your work, but people working on the economic side of things are quite sympathetic to your views. Would you define it that way?

Bjørn Lomborg: It's fairly obvious. When I say a particular problem is not a good use of money, not surprisingly the people who work in that area think I'm an idiot. Likewise, when I say a policy is a great idea, those people tend to think I'm brilliant. The point is simply that we need someone outside of a specific area to ask: what's the cost and what's the benefit?

On climate, a lot of climate scientists have been very critical of what I do. I think — and the data bears me out — that I've mostly been right about the points I make. Fewer people die, not more people, from climate-related disasters, not because of climate change but because getting people out of poverty means they're much less vulnerable to climate-related challenges. That's an important point, but it of course takes away from the narrative.

If you ask any school teacher, they will tell you the kids are not learning and to give them more money. If you ask hospital people, they'll say there's a health crisis and to give them more money. Everyone will always tell you to give them more money. In an ideal world, we should. But in the real world, we've got to ask ourselves whether that's the best place to spend money.

One of the things we've found in education economics is that spending more money on hiring more teachers — which sounds like a great idea, and obviously teachers like it — rarely improves learning.

Indonesia did this in the early 2000s. They doubled spending on teachers, hired another million teachers, increased the teaching force by almost a third. One of the most-read economics papers on education is actually called 'Double for Nothing'. Because the way it was implemented in different regions at different times, you could do a pseudo-randomised controlled trial. What it showed was that teachers were much happier getting paid twice as much, but there was no impact on student learning — and surely that's the main point of a schooling system.

Education economics, climate economics, any kind of economics — its job is to tell you about the stuff that works but also the stuff that doesn't.

Whenever something is shown not to work, there will be people who are very annoyed with you. I'm fine with that. But as a democracy, we need to hear what works and what doesn't, unfiltered from the interest groups and from the politicians who often like to say there's a climate catastrophe coming, vote for me and I'll put up solar panels and fix it all.

Arush Tandon: You mentioned the 169 SDG targets. If you were to make that list, what would be the number and what would be your targets?

Bjørn Lomborg: We did exactly that project. Back in 2014, before the UN did this, we worked with lots of economists, including several Nobel laureates, to find out what should be prioritised. Which kinds of targets could you actually do a lot of good with?

I met individually with a third of all the UN ambassadors in New York. That was a lot of hard work. And they all loved this information. But what they also told me was: Bjørn, this is not the game we're playing. The Norwegian ambassador was trying to get Norway's five points in there. The Brazilian ambassador was trying to get Brazil's four points in there. What we ended up with was everybody feeding in all kinds of good things.

We did another analysis back in 2023, at the halfway point of the SDGs. We asked our economists what the very best policies were, and we identified 12 policies where you can spend very few rupees and do an amazing amount of good.

Take education. In India, there are 168 million kids in primary school — grade one to eight. More than half of them cannot read and write in any reasonable way. They cannot take a short text and understand it. The World Bank calls that 'learning poverty'. And that's obviously not how you're going to get to Viksit Bharat and be developed by 2047.

The problem, which is very common across the world — and not just in developing countries — is that children go to school, but the school is just not very good. You learn a little, you learn perhaps to spell your way through letters and possibly words, but there's no understanding.

One way to address this — and Pratham in India has been leading the way on this — is to test each child and teach them at their own level. We have great studies from New Delhi where sixth graders in science classes were tested and found to be spread across grade levels from first to fifth. Imagine being the teacher in that situation. You end up teaching somewhere in the middle, which in sixth grade means you're teaching at third or fourth grade level.

What works — and all education economists agree — is if you teach each child at his or her own level, that is a much, much faster way forward. What Pratham does is stream the children: test them once a year, and then for one hour a day, take all the ones who are at fourth grade level and put them in the same class. Yes, you end up with some socially awkward situations — the 12-year-old and the six-year-old in the same group — but for one hour a day, these kids actually learn. The rest of the school day continues as before.

It costs about $13 per child per year. And the benefit is that you would double the efficiency of schooling. Each of these children will go on and make about $10,000 more in their lifetime. Spending $13 to do $1,000 of good — discounted to present value — is a fantastic deal.

You can do this either as Pratham does, or through tablets with educational software, which is more efficient but also more costly. Either way, it would cost about three billion dollars in India — less than 0.1 per cent of GDP per year. India already spends about 3.3 per cent of GDP on education. This would be a tiny fraction more. And you could make India 5 per cent richer over time.

For less than 0.1 per cent of GDP, you could make India 5 per cent richer. This is just a fantastic deal. Why are we not doing that? That's exactly the point we're trying to emphasise.

Arush Tandon: Just to put a counter-argument — which your critics do make — the absolute worst-case scenario of climate change may have a very low probability. But what if that scenario comes true? Your critics say you don't account for this possibility. How do you answer that?

Bjørn Lomborg: It's a good question and one I've given considerable thought. Let me give you an outline of an answer.

First: if the world really was heading towards disaster, this obviously is the problem we should be focusing on. The metaphor is a meteor hurtling towards Earth, going to eradicate us like the dinosaurs. If that's what climate change was, we should drop everything else and focus on fixing that problem. This is of course why a lot of the communication is focused on making you believe that's exactly the case. But it is not the end of the world in most scenarios.

You're right that we cannot exclude the possibility that it could be an end-of-the-world disaster. But we can't exclude any possibility of anything. Redhead women might take over the world tomorrow — it has a non-zero probability. There are non-zero probabilities of everything. Do we want to spend a lot of resources addressing very, very unlikely scenarios?

In the 1990s, we hadn't yet discovered most meteors in our solar system. We know meteors are a real way to potentially eradicate the human race. So NASA made a proposal to Congress to spend about $10 billion to map out 90 per cent of all the meteors that could hit Earth — the ones more than a kilometre wide, capable of extinguishing life.

They also gave Congress a model where they would map out 99 per cent, at fantastically more cost. Congress, predictably, said: we'll take the 90 per cent.

William Nordhaus, a Nobel laureate in economics, pointed out that Congress had essentially just put a price on humanity, because they said we're not going to spend all the money. Why 99 and not 99.9 or 99.9999?

There is no way to be completely safe without spending everything you have. But there are lots of other problems — Iran right now, North Korea, COVID, AI. If you just focus on one thing, you're going to end up not spending on all these other things.

This does not dismiss the question of whether we should be really worried about climate change. That requires you to look at what you can actually do about it. The current solutions — carbon emission reductions — are very, very expensive. Niti Aayog's own estimate of what going net zero by 2070 would cost India suggests about $8.1 trillion, or roughly two years of GDP. Spread over time, it's about 7.5 per cent of GDP per year — more than twice India's total spend on healthcare and more than India's entire combined public and private spend on education.

This is a lot of money. And no one tells you how much good that would do.

I ran the numbers using Niti Aayog's framework: the reduction in temperature by 2070 would be 0.05 degrees lower. By the end of the century, 0.07 degrees lower. You will just not be able to see this in the real world. So you can spend an enormous amount of resources and do almost no good. That is probably a bad policy.

Even if you worry about really bad outcomes, there's a much better way. Getting people out of poverty. If you lift people out of poverty, not only will their kids stop dying and they'll be better educated with better life opportunities — they will also be much better able to handle any climate problem that comes up.

If you're poor, you're affected terribly by climate. But you're also affected terribly by everything else — disease, hunger, everything. If you lift people out of poverty, they become much more resilient against climate problems.

Bill Gates actually came out at the last climate summit in Brazil and said exactly that. I thought it was spot on. Let's NOT do climate policy for climate policy's sake. Let's make sure we do climate policy so it actually helps humans.

Unfortunately, climate policy is a very expensive way to help just a tiny bit in a hundred years. If you want to do good, there are so many other things you could do that would not only help people much more, but actually also make them more climate-resilient.

Arush Tandon: You spoke of rising sea levels and how Holland solved for that. Do you think policymakers across the globe tend to do two things: underestimate the quality of humans to adapt and solve problems, and centralise all decision-making with themselves, attributing no agency to the people?

Bjørn Lomborg: Oh God, yes. And that's because policymakers are just like the rest of us. We all believe we can fix other people's problems. But we're not nearly as good at it as we think we are.

We need to recognise that it's very hard to go in and implement a precise solution, but it's very easy to make sure that people get out of poverty, get wealthy, and can then solve problems for themselves in the way that they see best fit. Sometimes we're not going to agree with them. Sometimes they're going to make decisions we wouldn't make, and that's fine.

There are some areas where targeted intervention makes sense because of externalities. If you get tuberculosis, that's your problem — but the fact that you're going to cough and pass it on to someone else is partly society's problem. And we know how to fix that fairly well.

When it comes to schooling, most kids wouldn't go to school on their own — we do need to make it compulsory. But we can do that very effectively if we focus on the interventions we know work, like what Pratham does.

There are very simple things we know how to do. Let's do those instead of command-and-control policies that typically don't work.

Arush Tandon: We see a similar narrative and discourse around nuclear power. Germany shut down all its nuclear plants and ended up paying more for the same power. Where do you stand on nuclear power, and what explains these clearly self-harming policies that some countries adopt?

Bjørn Lomborg: If you think about nuclear power, chances are you think it's something really dangerous. You'll think of Fukushima or Chernobyl and have an understanding — partly shaped by Greenpeace — that hundreds of thousands of people died. The EU, the World Health Organization, and the International Atomic Energy Agency did a comprehensive report on Chernobyl and found that probably 20 to 40 people have died from it in total.

That fits very, very badly with the understanding of how dangerous nuclear is. Again, this goes back to the fact that if I were a news channel, I wouldn't be telling you nobody died and it wasn't really all that big a deal. And so we end up with these almost comical outcomes. Germany cancelled all their nuclear power plants after Fukushima — a major earthquake that led to a tsunami that inundated a badly-sited nuclear plant's ventilation system. But that's not the problem Germany is facing. Germany is not worried about a tsunami. There is no way a tsunami is ever going to hit Germany. But they cancelled their plants anyway.

A paper actually showed that had Germany kept its nuclear plants open, they would have cut more CO2 than they have managed with all their renewables — and it would have been about $700 billion cheaper. Had they not panicked, they would have been in a much better place: cheaper and better environmental outcome.

Now, on where I stand on nuclear: it's obviously good when you've already built the plant. You've paid for it, you've already committed to paying for its eventual decommissioning. Right now, if it's safe to extend its life — and we believe almost all of these plants are — they're producing near-zero CO2 at virtually no cost, because you've already paid for the expensive parts. You're essentially getting free, clean energy. Why would you shut that down?

The harder question is whether we want to build a lot of new nuclear power plants. In China, they can build them incredibly cheaply and effectively. In the US, Finland, and the UK, construction is incredibly expensive. The real problem is that we build nuclear plants one at a time, like bespoke artworks. We don't do anything else like that. That's why it becomes so expensive.

Those advocating for fourth-generation nuclear are essentially saying: if you could make small modular reactors in a factory, you get the first one type-approved and then produce a thousand or 10,000 of them. This is how we produce most things in the world; it's how we get rich.

I don't know if it's going to work — we've been promised cheap nuclear with each previous generation and it hasn't quite turned out. But investing in research and development of this could be one of the best ways to fix climate change.

If we came up with very cheap fourth-generation nuclear, everyone would switch — Germans, Indians, Chinese — not because they were worried about climate, but simply because the breakthrough had made nuclear power the cheapest energy on the planet.

That's how you do development, not by forcing everyone to spend 7.5 per cent of GDP on doing virtually nothing in a hundred years, but by making clean energy cheaper than fossil fuels.

Arush Tandon: What, in your view, is the economic case for optimism? And do you think there is also a moral case?

Bjørn Lomborg: A lot of people think I'm an optimist. I actually believe I'm a realist. If you look at the standard scenarios for the future — the UN climate panel makes scenarios that go into their models to estimate future temperatures, and one of the things they have to project is how much richer India is going to be — on almost all of these estimates and all of the scenarios, India is going to be much richer by the end of the century. Some scenarios have you much, much richer. Some have you only much richer. That's a better future. This is almost not something we can discuss — it's a reflection of what reality shows. You're going to live longer, be better educated, have all of these things. This is not optimism. This is simply a reflection of what reality shows.

Of course, something could stop that. The people working on existential risk at Oxford actually estimate that it's not nuclear weapons or climate change most likely to pose an existential threat — it's AI. That's not my area of expertise, but we should probably be a little concerned about it. But realistically, the world is going to be much, much better off in 100 years. That's not optimism; that's realism.

And morally — which was your other question — it's a terrible way to look at the world and say it's just doomed in all kinds of ways and we should spend all of our money on these doomed scenarios. It's politically very effective, but it will very likely lead us to spend large sums of money doing very little good, and forgetting the family you mentioned who's just one medical emergency away from disaster.

We need to get back to a realistic framework where we say: we have limited resources, we have lots of challenges remaining, where can we spend those resources and do the most good? That's the realism that's really morally necessary.

And our choices matter. The question is not whether the world gets better — it will — but whether it gets better or gets much better. That's the delta we have a moral obligation to act on. If we instead of spending enormous resources on climate policy spend them on tuberculosis and education and these other things we've talked about, where for very little money we can do an incredible amount of good, we can help make the future even better. That is both a choice and a moral obligation.

Arush Tandon: Has anything in the past 30 years sowed a seed of self-doubt, or forced you to question your realism?

Bjørn Lomborg: I so badly want to have one thing I really got wrong, where I changed my mind. But no. And in some ways it's not very surprising because most of these things do not change very much. The knowledge base is pretty much the same as it was 30 years ago on how climate works. The cost-benefit ratios are about the same. This is true for most medical interventions and most educational interventions as well.

And that's why in some sense it's depressing that we're not getting better at this conversation. I'm fairly sure that someone else like me will be sitting with you and having the same conversation in 50 years. Julian Simon — the person who changed my mind — had a quote at the very beginning of his book: I predict that most things are going to be much, much better by the end of the century. I also predict that most people are still going to say it's terrible. That sort of sums up the whole point. We will always have people saying, my goodness, this one problem, that problem. And it's not bad that they're saying it. The only way we get better is by having people point out that there are problems here. That's why I said at the very beginning, I'm glad Greenpeace is there to say here's potentially a problem. But we shouldn't only listen to them. We need to ask the hard questions: is this still better spending than over here where we know there's a real big problem? And the answer is often no.

Arush Tandon: And lastly: growing up in India, we heard very serious stories about a large hole in the ozone layer over Australia. And then when we grew up, we didn't hear a thing about it. What happened to that hole in the ozone layer?

Bjørn Lomborg: The ozone problem was a real problem. It was actually a very good example of what happened later with climate change. It's a real problem, but it was vastly overstated. For most places — and if you don't live in Antarctica, which very, very few people do — it was a problem equivalent to moving a couple of hundred kilometres closer to the equator. That is not normally associated with, my God, the kids can't play outside and we're all going to die. You do get more UV light, you do have a higher chance of getting skin cancer — that's a real problem. But it was vastly exaggerated.

The way we solved it: the main driver was not spray cans, as is popularly believed, but refrigeration equipment, which was using CFC gases — a very good gas for consumers but with the bad side effect of destroying part of the ozone layer. DuPont came up with an expensive but not terribly expensive replacement. All the countries in the world — including Reagan's US — decided to spend about $100 billion in total to fix this. That's why you don't hear about it anymore — because we mostly fixed it. It's not fully fixed in the atmosphere, but most people believe it will be fixed in the next 50 years, and we addressed most of the root cause of the problem.

The reason we could fix it was because we found a cheap replacement. That's what we don't have with climate change. What most people are suggesting for climate policy is: let's spend an enormous amount of money and do a little good in a hundred years. That's just not very tempting — which is of course why nobody's really signing up to this.

That's why the very best solution for climate change is investing in green energy R&D. If you can come up with fourth-generation nuclear power that just out-competes everything else, then you've solved it. If you can come up with a solution that's cheaper than what we're doing now, everyone will buy into it. We need to replicate what we did with the ozone layer: not all the scare, but the simple, science-based point of saying, here's a problem, here's a better solution, now we've fixed it. That's how you fix most problems.

Back in the 1960s, a lot of people worried that India wouldn't be able to feed itself. Some very prominent voices were suggesting India was a basket case that should just be left to famine. The solution was the Green Revolution — dramatically improving yields on every hectare of land. That's why India is now the world's leading rice exporter. You've gone from being a basket case to an incredibly well-fed population because of a green revolution in technology, not by moaning and saying everything is lost and we're all going to die.

Get back to fixing problems rather than just being scared witless. Let's try to find the people from India or from Ghana who will be the next ones to come up with the amazing solutions that make the world even better.