Lomborg, Bjørn & Revkin, Andrew

Lomborg, Bjørn: president of the Copenhagen Consensus think tank; author of False Alarm, Cool It, and The Skeptical Environmentalist

Revkin, Andrew: veteran climate journalist, roughly 20 years at the New York Times, author of works including The Human Planet

Climate Change Debate: Bjørn Lomborg and Andrew Revkin

Lex Fridman Podcast · Nov 18, 2022

• climate change policy debate
• Bjørn Lomborg
• Andrew Revkin
• cost-benefit analysis of climate policy
• disaster vulnerability versus climate change
• IPCC and climate communication
• energy innovation and nuclear power
• electric vehicles and emissions
• climate alarmism and media narrative
• Copenhagen Consensus

Core ideas

Both guests reject the idea of a simple "for or against climate change" spectrum, arguing instead that public discourse conflates several distinct questions: whether warming is happening and human-caused (which they both affirm), how much specific disasters are attributable to warming versus to humans building more people and property in hazardous places, and what policies would most cost-effectively reduce harm. Revkin describes his own multi-decade shift in emphasis, from early reporting focused on pollution and the "greenhouse effect" toward recognizing that humanity has simultaneously built enormous vulnerability into hazard-prone areas (citing Pakistan's floodplain population growth, Florida's coastal development, and "Flash Flood Alley" near Austin) — a dynamic he says the underlying science literature already accounts for but that news coverage and advocacy often obscure by attributing disaster losses to climate change alone. Lomborg cites an OECD survey finding 60% of respondents in rich countries believe global warming will "likely or very likely" cause human extinction, arguing this reflects a genuinely alarmist distortion he believes is not supported by the UN's own climate panel (IPCC) assessments, and that treating climate as an imminent existential emergency forecloses consideration of policies whose benefits play out over 50-100 year timescales.

Both discuss the psychology and incentives behind alarmist framing: Lomborg says he understands why activists like Greta Thunberg adopt urgent rhetoric (crediting her with raising public engagement) while considering the "12 years to save the world" framing factually mistaken and counterproductive, since it implies nothing matters except immediate, total decarbonization. Revkin traces this specific framing to spin around the IPCC's 2018 "1.5°C" special report rather than the report's actual content, and both describe a broader "narrative capture" dynamic — reinforced by media incentives, funding structures, and in-group social pressure among scientists and journalists — that makes contrarian or nuance-adding findings (e.g., research showing Antarctic ice-sheet collapse is likely more gradual and self-limiting than "collapse" headlines suggest) harder to get attention for. Both recount facing public backlash for departing from expected narratives — Revkin describes being told by Rush Limbaugh's radio show to "kill himself" over a 2009 comment about carbon and population, and having colleague Roger Pielke Jr.'s career affected by criticism from climate activists; Lomborg says he interprets hostile pushback as a sign his arguments are landing rather than evidence he's wrong.

A substantial portion of the conversation covers Lomborg's cost-effectiveness framework, developed through the Copenhagen Consensus project with panels of economists (including Nobel laureates): he argues that policies aimed directly at cutting CO2 emissions in rich countries (EU and US net-zero targets) are likely to cost trillions of dollars while producing measurable but very small temperature effects (his estimate: US net-zero would reduce global temperature by roughly 0.3°F by century's end), delivering perhaps 30 cents to a few dollars of benefit per dollar spent — compared to interventions like tuberculosis treatment (~$43 return per dollar), early-childhood nutrition (~$45 per dollar), or e-procurement reforms to reduce corruption in developing-country government spending, which he presents as dramatically higher-return uses of the same money. He argues the highest-return climate-specific investment is energy innovation (making next-generation clean energy — he cites potential fourth-generation nuclear reactors and other technologies — cheaper than fossil fuels outright, which would drive global adoption without requiring anyone to sacrifice) rather than subsidizing current-generation renewables or electric vehicles, which he characterizes as disproportionately benefiting wealthy buyers (citing data that most EV sales are in the $60-80k+ range, and that EVs are typically second cars driven less than half as much as conventional vehicles) while doing comparatively little to cut emissions per dollar spent. Revkin adds important qualifications to this framework: cost-benefit models often explicitly exclude "friction" (community resistance to transmission lines, permitting delays for mining) that can undermine projected trajectories, and he cautions that models are only as good as their assumptions.

Revkin discusses hurricanes and disasters at length from a science-communication angle: research in "paleotempestology" (studying sediment records of historical storms) suggests severe hurricanes are rare-but-recurring events on multi-century timescales rather than a new phenomenon, and the mid-20th-century Atlantic "hurricane drought" is now attributed largely to European sulfate pollution suppressing Saharan storm formation, unrelated to global warming — a nuance he says is typically left out of media coverage. Both agree that measurable increases in storm damage are overwhelmingly explained by more people and more valuable property being built in hazard zones (the "expanding bullseye" effect) rather than by increased storm frequency, and both note that vulnerability is decreasing over time in percentage-of-GDP terms due to better prediction, evacuation, and resilience — citing Bangladesh's dramatic reduction in cyclone deaths (from hundreds of thousands in the 1970s to roughly 123 in a comparable recent storm) as a case of poverty reduction and infrastructure improvement mattering far more than any change in storm intensity. On energy specifically, both are cautious about EVs as a near-term climate solution and split further discussion between existing nuclear power plants (which Lomborg calls "the cheapest power you can possibly have" and both argue should not be prematurely shut down, citing the Indian Point closure in New York being replaced largely by natural gas) versus new nuclear construction (currently very expensive, per recent European projects), with both favoring continued innovation in areas like small modular reactors.

Both push back, with caveats, on the idea of a widespread political "belief" divide over the reality of climate change, citing Yale Program on Climate Change Communication research (Revkin cites work by Dan Kahan on "cultural cognition") showing that people with the highest scientific literacy about climate are found at both extremes of the belief spectrum, and that polarization largely disappears when questions are reframed around energy innovation rather than "belief" in climate crisis — both cite examples (a libertarian, creationist Oklahoma oil-company employee installing solar panels to get off the grid; bipartisan state-level support for clean-energy incentives that isn't labeled as climate policy) to argue that identity-driven resistance is much more about opposition to top-down government mandates and taxation than about the underlying science. Lomborg also defends, with qualifications, arguments associated with Alex Epstein's "moral case for fossil fuels" — agreeing that roughly 80% of global energy still comes from fossil fuels, that this dependency is understated in public perception of renewables' current scale, and that making fossil fuels artificially expensive before affordable alternatives exist disproportionately harms the global poor — while stating he believes Epstein doesn't adequately account for the need to constrain warming. Both close by discussing the value of empathetic, curiosity-driven journalism over adversarial "gotcha" interviewing (Revkin describes deliberately interviewing people with views he strongly disputes, including a physicist who supported more atmospheric CO2, to surface points of genuine value rather than scoring rhetorical points), and offer advice to young people centered on rejecting climate doomerism, pursuing concrete high-leverage problems (energy innovation, tuberculosis treatment, social innovations in the developing world), and cultivating both a "sense of urgency and a sense of patience" simultaneously — echoing what Revkin describes as a serenity-prayer-like distinction between what can be changed quickly, what requires decades, and what remains genuinely uncertain.

Excerpts