Bjørn Lomborg: 'Five inches...? I can't even remember that figure'

'Let’s do it in my office, the saddest room in the world,' jokes Bjørn Lomborg, the man who has ranked as the chief bogeyman for climate campaigners ever since his book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, hit the bookstands ten years ago.

The room, in a dark corridor on an upper floor of the Copenhagen Business School, is piled with boxes, its shelves empty, making it difficult to find a place to sit.

In November, Denmark’s new centre-left government withdrew funding from the Copenhagen Consensus Center, the Lomborg-run think tank which argues that setting caps on carbon emissions should not rank even in the top 30 of global priorities. 'This is pay-back time,' Lomborg says.
 
'I met with the woman who's now Prime Minister (Helle Thorning-Schmidt, the daughter-in-law of former labour leader Neil Kinnock). I said. "I’d love to show you how the Copenhagen Consensus is a good idea,’ and she looked at me and she said: "I think that probably might be right, Bjørn, but I will just get so much more mileage out of criticising you."' 

Whatever the truth of that story, the fact is that on January 1, 90 per cent of Lomborg’s funding, about...

To view the rest of this article - you must be a paying subscriber and Login