Finally Golden Rice
Finally, golden rice with vitamin A will be grown in the Philippines. It is 12 years late.
Over these 12 years, about 8 million kids have died from vitamin A deficiency. Are anti-GM advocates not at least partially responsible?
Read the full commentary on
Slate. Translations in 5 languages are available at
Project Syndicate.
Climate Change Misdirection
President Obama urged us to tackle global warming in his inauguration speech. Great, says Bjorn Lomborg in Wall Street Journal. But using scares of 'devastating fires, crippling droughts, and more powerful storms' is wrong. It distracts us from simple, cheaper and smarter solutions.
Rather than subsidizing existing, inefficient solar panels, we need to invest in research to create the cheap, efficient solar panels of the future. Let’s ask for a better conversation and smarter solutions, the most promising of which are R&D and adaptation. Read the full
op-ed in WSJ.
Top Global Think Tank
Copenhagen Consensus Center has again hit the top 30 in University of Pennsylvania 2012
Global Go To Think Tanks Index, punching way above it weight: size doesn't matter but quality and impact do!
See our
press release here.
Chinese Farmers
Save 2x France
One of the planet's most under-appreciated environmental positives is ever higher farm yields.
More efficient farmers save nature. Just corn farmers in China have spared nature the size of two times France.
Had Chinese maize (corn) yields stayed the same since 1960, China would need 155m hectares of land. But because yields have increased 350%, 120mHa were spared. This is an area of more than two times France. Not coincidentally, the forest area of China increased 30 percent from 1990-2010.
See Lomborg's commentary here.
Are Humans a plague?
Bjorn Lomborg challenges Sir David Attenborough's notion of humans being a “plague on the Earth” and insists that the planet can sustain a much bigger population thanks to innovation.
"He argues that new technologies mean that humans need less land to produce food. Therefore the population can grow without harming wildlife and as people become richer it may even be possible to return degraded land to wildlife."
Read the full interview in the Telegraph.
Cost of Feel-Good Energy
Real German electricity prices for households have increased 61% since 2000. One quarter of household costs now stem directly from renewable energy.
Also, the increase is not because of increasing production costs (which have actually slightly declined since 1978). Read Lomborg's much shared commentary on Facebook.
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