Meet the Man Greens Hate More than Climate Change Deniers -- By Walter Russell Mead, The American Interest

Environmentalists love to hate him, but Bjørn Lomborg is consistently one of the smartest green thinkers out there, and he’s proven that again with a new piece exposing the rampant inefficiencies in Europe’s green policies. Lomborg writes for Project Syndicate:

[T]he only peer-reviewed overview of EU climate policy estimates that it can avoid climate-related damage of about $10 billion per year. So, for every dollar spent, the EU stands to avoid about ten cents of damage.
This does not mean that climate change is not important; it means only that the EU’s climate policy is not smart.

The key takeaway: even if every over-the-top prediction by every environmentalist Chicken Little were true; even if Al Gore were underestimating the danger of climate change, the key policies greens want would still be expensive flops, producing only a couple of cents’ worth of climate mitigation for every dollar spent. Lomborg echoes a familiar Via Meadia position when he suggests that “[r]ather than relying on cutting a few tons of incredibly overpriced CO2 now, we need to invest in research and development aimed at innovating down the cost of green energy in the long run.”

To hear greens tell it, Lomborg is worse than a climate change denier—he acknowledges the dangers but isn’t fanatically devoted to the starry-eyed “solutions” environmentalists think  necessary. He’s not callously brushing off environmental concerns; he’s speaking out against the inefficient and unworkable solutions that the grossly incompetent green movement endlessly agitates for.

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