On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher acknowledged that climate policy for the past 20 years has essentially told people to lower their standards of living in the name of the environment.
Author Bjorn Lomborg said, “One of the things that we have been trying to do for the last 20 years in climate policy is basically tell people to be poorer, be less well off, be uncomfortable, would you mind being a little hotter in the summer and a little colder in the winter?”
Maher responded, “Right.”
Lomborg continued, “That’s just not going to work. What is going to work is innovation. Remember, Los Angeles in the 1950s…it was terribly polluted. And the sort of standard climate way of tackling that would be to tell [people], would you mind walking instead of driving around?” Maher also agreed with that assessment.
Lomborg continued, “Of course that wouldn’t work in Los Angeles or anywhere else. But what we did was, instead, we invented the catalytic converter. It’s a little gizmo you put on the tailpipe of a car, and then you can drive much longer and pollute much, much less. That’s how you solve the problem, both of air pollution, and in the long run, in climate change.”
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