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When thinking about the future, it is fashionable to be pessimistic. Yet the evidence unequivocally belies such pessimism. Over the past centuries, humanity's lot has improved dramatically - in the developed world, where it is rather obvious, but also in the developing world, where life expectancy has more than doubled in the past 100 years.

Bjorn Lomborg

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Bjorn Lomborg
Age: 59
Born: 1965
Born: January 9
Economist
Environmentalist
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Bjorn Lomborg
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More quotes by Bjorn Lomborg

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We worry about the seemingly ever-increasing number of natural catastrophes. Yet this is mainly a consequence of CNN - we see many more, but the number is roughly constant, and we manage to deal much better with them over time. Globally, the death rate from catastrophes has dropped about fifty-fold over the past century.
Bjorn Lomborg
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The obvious issue is providing clean drinking water and sanitation to every single human being on earth at the cost of little more than one year of the Kyoto treaty.
Bjorn Lomborg
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The total efforts of the last 20 years of climate policy has likely reduced global emissions by less than 1 percent, or about 250 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year.
Bjorn Lomborg
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Of course, the world is full of problems. But on the other hand it's important to get the sense... are we generally moving in the right direction or the wrong direction?
Bjorn Lomborg
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We've had the U.N. for almost 60 years, yet we've never actually made a fundamental list of all the big things that we can do in the world, and said, 'Which of them should we do first?'
Bjorn Lomborg
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I found university a little dispiriting. I thought I would enter the great halls of Plato, but instead I entered the halls of an intellectual sausage factory. I wanted to do something not on the main course, and chose the environment.
Bjorn Lomborg
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We need to invest dramatically in green energy, making solar panels so cheap that everybody wants them. Nobody wanted to buy a computer in 1950, but once they got cheap, everyone bought them.
Bjorn Lomborg
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I really try to say things as they basically are and it so happens that it is a good message that things are getting better, but there are still problems.
Bjorn Lomborg
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The Kyoto treaty has an estimated cost of between US$150 and $350 billion a year, starting in 2010.
Bjorn Lomborg
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...children born today-in both the industrialized world and developing countries-will live longer and be healthier, they will get more food, a better education, a higher standard of living, more leisure time and far more possibilities-without the global environment being destroyed.
Bjorn Lomborg
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Obviously any group that has to have funding also needs to get attention to their issues.
Bjorn Lomborg
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I'm an old member of Greenpeace. I worried intensely, as I think most of my friends did, that the world was coming apart.
Bjorn Lomborg
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The fact that we're catching more fish per person than we've ever done before doesn't mean that there are not particular places where we've managed fisheries badly.
Bjorn Lomborg
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Im no expert on American politics.
Bjorn Lomborg
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There is no question that global warming will have a significant impact on already existing problems such as malaria, malnutrition, and water shortages. But this doesn't mean the best way to solve them is to cut carbon emissions.
Bjorn Lomborg
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I think it's great that we have organisations like Greenpeace. In a pluralistic society, we want to have people who point out all the problems that the Earth could encounter. But we need to understand that they are not presenting a full and rounded view.
Bjorn Lomborg
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Surely the biggest problem we have in the world is that we all die. But we don't have a technology to solve that, right? So the point is not to prioritize problems the point is to prioritize solutions to problems.
Bjorn Lomborg
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So it's mainly a question of helping the Third World overcome the effects of global warming.
Bjorn Lomborg
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Global warming is real - it is man-made and it is an important problem. But it is not the end of the world.
Bjorn Lomborg