It’s time for a second Green Revolution

Between 2000 and 2015 the world made great progress on the Millennium Development Goals, which aimed to hit important targets in education, income growth, fighting disease and so on. In 2015, world leaders followed up that success by establishing the Sustainable Development Goals, a hodge-podge of 169 priorities. We’re now halfway to the target date of 2030 and, not surprisingly, progress has been minimal. In part, COVID setbacks are to blame but the crucial problem is lack of focus. Today, Bjorn Lomborg kicks off a 12-part weekly series in which he and his colleagues at the Copenhagen...

Bjørn is the author of False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet. With his think tank, the Copenhagen Consensus, he has worked with hundreds of the world’s top economists and seven Nobel Laureates to find and promote the most effective solutions to the world’s greatest challenges, from disease and hunger to climate and education.

The restoration of the ozone layer proves that we can solve environmental problems when we have good replacements for pollutants. In an interview for America's Newsroom, Lomborg points out that the lesson for climate change is that we need to innovate cheap and reliable energy that can truly outcompete fossil fuels.