What If the Scariest Problems Aren't The Most Important Ones?

Bjørn Lomborg has the demeanour of a man who has emphasized the same point at several hundred dinner parties and learned not to expect dessert. Speaking over video from his apartment — trim, genial, he has the delivery down to something between a TED talk and a bedside manner. The patience is genuine. It needs to be. He has been arguing his case for close to 30 years. 

The thing he has been saying is this: 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 tomorrow morning. He is not a climate denier. He is something more annoying than that. He is a climate accountant.

"Obviously we don't know — there are risks that could actually happen," he says, when asked the almost comically blunt question of whether the world is ending. "But fundamentally, things are getting better and better in almost all aspects." He ticks off the list with the ease of long rehearsal — longer lives, higher incomes, better education, lower child mortality. "You can both say the world is getting better and still say there are tons of stuff that we need to fix." The emphasis on both is deliberate. It is the hinge of his entire intellectual project, and also the part that nobody ever hears.

The origin story has the quality of a parable, which may be why he tells it so well. In the late 1990s, Lomborg was a young statistics lecturer at the Aarhus University, Denmark, and, by his own description, "your average suburban, slightly left-leaning kind of guy." He was a paying member of Greenpeace. He had the backpack, the badges on the backpack, and a poster on his 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." He pauses. "It turns out that was a fake."

In 1997, he read a Wired magazine interview featuring Julian Simon, an American economist who argued that by most measurable indicators, life on Earth was improving.

Lomborg's reaction was immediate and professorial: Simon was obviously wrong, and proving it would be a useful exercise for his students. He bought Simon's book. He started a study group. They pulled the UN data.

"And that was where I realised, my goodness, a lot of things have actually gotten better."

It is a conversion narrative, and like most conversion narratives, it raises the question of what exactly was converted. Lomborg did not become a free-market ideologue or a fossil-fuel apologist, though his critics have spent a quarter-century trying to file him under one or both headings. What changed was subtler and, in its way, more radical: he stopped believing that the people telling him the world was falling apart were the most reliable guides to what should be done about it.

"I'm glad that an organisation like Greenpeace exists," he says, and appears to mean it. "We should definitely hear about problems. But we shouldn't only believe Greenpeace."

The case against only believing Greenpeace — or, for that matter, against only believing the particular flavour of catastrophism that dominates climate discourse — is now enshrined in what Lomborg and his Copenhagen Consensus Center have turned into a system of cost-benefit analysis. The operation involves more than 300 economists, including seven Nobel laureates, and the pitch is deceptively simple: given that resources are limited, where does a dollar — or a rupee — do the most good?

The answers are, by design, uncomfortable for everyone.

Take education. There are 168 million children in India's primary schools. More than half of them, by the World Bank's measure of "learning poverty", cannot read a short text and understand it. This is not some rarefied pedagogical complaint. These are children who are in school, sitting in classrooms, and leaving functionally illiterate. The problem, Lomborg explains, is that a sixth-grade classroom may contain children performing at every level from first to fifth. "Imagine being the teacher in that situation. You end up teaching somewhere in the middle."

The fix, pioneered by the Indian organisation Pratham, is to test each child and teach them at their level — streaming them for one hour a day into groups matched to their actual ability. "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 cost: roughly $13 per child per year. The benefit, compounded over a lifetime of higher earnings: approximately $1,000 per child in present value. "Spending $13 to do $1,000 of good is a fantastic deal." Scaled across India, it would cost about $3 billion a year — less than a tenth of one per cent of GDP. It would, by his estimate, make India five per cent richer over time.

Now consider the alternative demand on India's resources. Niti Aayog's own estimate of what it would cost India to reach net zero by 2070 is approximately $8.1 trillion — roughly two years of GDP, or about 7.5 per cent of GDP per year when spread over the timeline. That is more than twice India's total healthcare spend and more than its entire combined public and private expenditure on education.

And the climatic return? Lomborg ran the numbers using Niti Aayog's own framework. The temperature reduction by 2070: 0.05 degrees Celsius. By the end of the century: 0.07 degrees. "You will just not be able to see this in the real world."

Thirteen dollars per child, or eight trillion dollars for a number that rounds to zero. This is the kind of comparison that makes Lomborg both indispensable and insufferable, depending on which side of the ledger you have built your career.

The question of why these comparisons do not settle the argument — why, in fact, they barely register — is the more interesting question, and the one Lomborg has spent the longest thinking about.

In 2014, before the United Nations adopted its Sustainable Development Goals, he and his economists produced a rigorous ranking of which targets would deliver the most good per dollar. He then did something unusual for an academic: he went to New York and met, individually, with a third of all UN ambassadors.

"They all loved this information," he says. "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 priorities included. The Brazilian ambassador was pushing Brazil's four. What emerged was not a set of priorities but a wish list — 169 targets covering everything from poverty to war to climate to unemployment. "You can't disagree with that sentiment," Lomborg says, with the careful diplomacy of a man who very much disagrees with that sentiment. "But in the real world, we're not going to be able to do it."

When his team later held a large public event in Denmark, asking tens of thousands of citizens what they wanted to focus on, the answer was almost unanimous: climate change. "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."

This is the mechanism that Lomborg keeps running into, and it operates with the reliability of a Swiss watch. The media, whose business model depends on telling you the most alarming story of the last 24 hours, curates the fear. Advocacy organisations amplify it. Politicians convert it into mandates. And the public, duly terrified, endorses spending on whatever frightens them most, not on whatever would help the most.

"Over the last 25 years, the world has lifted well over a billion people out of poverty," Lomborg says. "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." He pauses, for effect or for genuine sadness — it is hard to tell with Lomborg, and may be both. "They never do. Most people actually think poverty has increased."

His critics, of course, have a rebuttal, and it is not a trivial one. The absolute worst-case climate scenarios may have a low probability. But what if they come true?

Lomborg takes this seriously, or at least performs taking it seriously with enough conviction to suggest the real thing. "If the world really was heading towards disaster, this obviously is the problem we should be focusing on," he says. "The metaphor is a meteor hurtling towards Earth. If that's what climate change was, we should drop everything else."

But, he argues, it is not. And the logic of insuring against every tail risk leads to paralysis, or worse, to spending everything on one tail while ignoring the others. He invokes an anecdote about NASA in the 1990s, proposing to map 90 per cent of all asteroids large enough to end life on Earth. Congress could have paid more for 99 per cent coverage, or 99.9. They chose 90. The Nobel laureate William Nordhaus observed that Congress had, in effect, put a price on the survival of the species.

"There is no way to be completely safe without spending everything you have," Lomborg says. "But there are lots of other problems — Iran right now, North Korea, Covid, AI." If the climate tail risk justifies unlimited spending, why not the AI tail risk, which researchers at Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute rate as a greater existential threat?

The better path, he argues, is not climate policy for its own sake but poverty reduction — which, as a side effect, makes populations dramatically more resilient to whatever climate throws at them. "If you're poor, you're affected terribly by climate. But you're also affected terribly by everything else. If you lift people out of poverty, they become much more resilient."

He notes, with visible satisfaction, that Bill Gates made essentially the same argument at the most recent climate summit in Brazil. "Let's not do climate policy for climate policy's sake. Let's make sure we do climate policy so it actually helps humans."

There is a version of Lomborg's story that casts him as a brave truth-teller shouting into the void. There is another version — the one preferred by a large number of climate scientists — that casts him as a sophisticated minimiser whose cost-benefit framing systematically undervalues catastrophic risk and provides intellectual cover for inaction.

He is aware of both versions and unbothered by the tension between them. "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."

What is harder to dismiss is the structural observation underneath his work — that every interest group, by definition, will tell you its problem is the most urgent and its funding is inadequate. "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."

This is not cynicism. It is, he would say, the starting point for rational policy — the recognition that in a world of competing claims, someone has to ask the question that nobody asking for money will ever ask: compared to what?

Germany provides his favourite cautionary tale, and he tells it with the relish of a man who has been dining out on it for years.

After the Fukushima disaster in 2011 — a major earthquake, a tsunami, a badly-sited nuclear plant — Germany cancelled its entire nuclear programme. The problem, Lomborg notes, is that Germany is not facing a tsunami. "There is no way a tsunami is ever going to hit Germany. But they cancelled their plants anyway."

A subsequent study showed that had Germany kept its nuclear plants running, it would have cut more carbon emissions than its entire renewables programme — and saved approximately $700 billion in the process. "Had they not panicked, they would have been in a much better place: cheaper energy and a better environmental outcome."

The story is, for Lomborg, a parable about what happens when fear makes policy. A real disaster in Japan produced a phantom threat in Bavaria, which produced a real and measurably worse outcome for the German climate, the German consumer, and the German grid. The Doom Premium, paid in full.

He is more careful on the forward-looking question of whether new nuclear should be built. In China, he notes, construction is cheap and efficient. In the West, it is ruinously expensive, because "we build nuclear plants one at a time, like bespoke artworks." The promise of small modular reactors — factory-produced, type-approved, and potentially deployed at scale — is the kind of technological fix that excites him, because it sidesteps the entire fear-and-politics loop. "If we came up with very cheap fourth-generation nuclear, everyone would switch — not because they were worried about climate, but simply because it was the cheapest energy on the planet."

This is his theory of change, stated plainly: do not try to frighten people into spending money on problems they cannot see. Make the solution cheaper than the alternative, and the market will do the rest. It is how the ozone layer was fixed — not through panic, but through DuPont developing a replacement refrigerant that was expensive but not prohibitively so. It is how India went from a country that prominent Western voices suggested should be "left to famine" to the world's leading rice exporter — not through moralising, but through the Green Revolution's unglamorous work of improving crop yields.

"Get back to fixing problems," he says, "rather than just being scared witless."

Near the end of the conversation, I ask whether anything in the past 30 years has given him pause — a moment of genuine self-doubt, a data point that cut against the thesis.

He considers this for what feels like the first honest pause of the hour. "I so badly want to have one thing I really got wrong, where I changed my mind." Another pause. "But no."

The knowledge base on climate economics, he says, has not fundamentally shifted in three decades. Neither have the cost-benefit ratios on tuberculosis, education, or maternal health. The interventions that worked in 2001 still work in 2025. The ones that didn't still don't. What has changed is the volume of the panic and the scale of the spending — in precisely the wrong direction.

"I'm fairly sure that someone else like me will be sitting with you and having the same conversation in 50 years," he says.

It is the most melancholy thing he has said all hour, and he appears to know it. He reaches, as he often does, for Julian Simon — the economist whose Wired interview set the whole thing in motion. Simon wrote, at the 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," Lomborg says, with the smile of a man who knows he is right but also knows that, given the choice between common sense and panic, almost everybody will choose the panic.

India has 300,000 people dying of tuberculosis every year. It has 300,000 mothers and newborns dying around childbirth. It has 84 million children who cannot read. These are problems with known solutions and modest price tags. They are also, by the logic of the news cycle, not frightening enough to lead the bulletin and not glamorous enough to attract the funding.

Somewhere, a front page is being laid out. It will not say that 138,000 people were lifted out of poverty yesterday. It never does.

Bjørn Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center and the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, False Alarm, and Best Things First. He spoke to Swarajya’s Arush Tandon by video call.