Ask people to spend more than a few hundred dollars a year on climate policies, and most won’t agree. That’s according Bjorn Lomborg, president of Copenhagen Consensus Center writing in New York Post on February 20, 2022. The former director of the Danish Environmental Assessment Institute in Copenhagen believes our current green energy will cost too much, and we need to think more broadly.
Will Green Energy Cost Run Out of Control?
Bjorn Lomborg cites a Bank of America report claiming net-zero will cost $150 trillion over 30 years. That’s almost twice the combined annual GDP of every country on Earth. The annual cost of $5 trillion is also more than all the world’s governments and households spend every year on education.
Moreover, a McKinsey study says the poorest African nations would have to sacrifice more than 10 percent of their total national incomes. Developing countries will probably find green energy costs too much, and opt out Bjorn Lomborg says. The net result, he adds will be a ‘relatively trifling cut to global emissions, with the rich world getting all the pain for little gain’.
How to Keep Green Energy Cost Affordable
But Bjorn Lomborg does not believe in ignoring global warming. This isn’t an argument to do nothing, but just to be smarter, he insists. ‘We need to ramp up research and development, and innovate down the price of green energy to ensure we can transition from fossil fuels.
We should therefore invest across all options not just wind and solar. We must include fusion, fission, storage, biofuel and other sources. That’s because only when green energy is cheaper than fossil will the world be able, and willing to make the transition. Otherwise, today’s energy prices are just a taste of things to come.
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