Reducing Carbon Emissions Not Working

Bjorn Lomborg is adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School and the organizer of the Copenhagen Consensus Center think tank.

For many years Lomborg has been arguing against relying on cuts in carbon emissions but instead focusing on making green fuels cheaper.

[Bjorn Lomborg, Organizer, Copenhagen Consensus Center]:
"I'm not a climate skeptic in the sense of 'is global warming real?' Yes, it's real, it's man-made, it's an important problem. What I am skeptical about is the way that we seem to be intent on following policies that have failed for almost twenty years now. Is it not time to say 'plan A wasn't working?' Let's do something smarter and something that actually has a great chance of working that the climate economics tells us is a better deal and fundamentally something that will help us tackle global warming."

Rising seas, desertification, floods and cyclones that could devastate economies and ruin the livelihoods of millions of people these are some of the challenges facing the 15 thousand participants trying to hammer out a climate pact.

Negotiators are struggling to agree on how deeply carbon emissions need to be cut and how much it will cost to switch from polluting fossil fuels to cleaner energy.

[Bjorn Lomborg, Organizer, Copenhagen Consensus Center]:
Everybody has been on track for several years to come out and promise quite large carbon cuts all across the board. Now that sounds really good but we've done that twice already. We made the same promises in Rio in 1992, we made even grander promises in Kyoto in 1997. We haven't lived up to any of them.

Lomborg says there are cheaper and better ways to go about changing things.

[Bjorn Lomborg, Organizer, Copenhagen Consensus Center]:
So we can spend a lot of money to cut a little carbon that will do very little good for the future. Instead, we should be investing a lot more in research and development, into green energy technology because fundamentally, it's about making sure we have the future technology that will power the 21st century without emitting CO2. So instead of having very expensive solar panels right now that a few well meaning Westerners will put up on their rooftops, we should have very cheap solar panels that everyone, including the Chinese and the Indians want to put up."

Pressure is building on Copenhagen to deliver a "fast-start" climate fund from 2010. The UN says it should be at least 10 billion U.S. dollars a year.

But for Bjorn Lomborg, money would be better spent on research and development into green energy technology.

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[Salladsdressing]

Nelly Furtado is working as a newsreporter? Didn't know...! =)

[rocketsredglare101]

I think the best way to reduce carbon emissions in the west is to have an immigration moratorium. Statistics clearly show the USA population grew by 100 million in the last 40 years and nearly all the growth was due to immigration.

The west could drasically reduce carbon emissions with a reduction in immigration and population and would have nearly stable growth in the USA with a moratorium on immigration.