Bjorn Lomborg Brings Us Cool It

Written by Jonathan Jacobs

Roadside Attractions (sounds perfect for the Drive-In theater) and 1019 Entertainment present Cool It; a film about environmental change and how it has impacted the world's political and economic sectors. The mind behind this splendid documentary is popular climate change author Bjorn Lomborg. The initial images displayed are of icebergs breaking away and of alarmist's prognostications of mass-inundation, extinction, oxygen depletion and desertification. These are graphic images often supplied by profit-seeking political and entrepreneurial opportunists. Clearly the focus of this documentary is on Bjorn’s credibility and the truth behind his “science”. All in all Cool It has a hot opening.

Lomborg is Danish. He became a vegetarian at the age of eleven and essentially a pacifist in doing so. He joined the environmental activist organization Greenpeace International as a young a man. As the narrator (Bjorn himself) highlights, reliable data indicates the Western world has cleaner air, an abundance of food and considerable prosperity. He believes our planet is not doomed. He founded the Copenhagen Consensus to provide the best solutions to the world’s biggest problems to find ways to alleviate poverty in the developing world. He sought to eliminate waste and to apply the additional resources to the third world’s people for their benefit, not that of foolish politicians.

Bjorn is best known for his bestselling and highly-controversial non-fiction work The Skeptical Environmentalist, a book that challenges the popular conception that the planet is being destroyed. He argues we should erratically and unscientifically try to impose a solution on the problem of climate change. As such many global warming activists opposed him and labeled him a charlatan and an uninformed liar. Bjorn understands his detractors were entirely politically motivated and were incredulous to consider new avenues for solving the climate problems the world faces.

Attacking Bjorn’s credibility had been politicians’ modus operandi in discrediting the “skeptical environmentalist”.  Essentially, as observers note, scientific debate once more became politicized. Bjorn blames the “establishment” for ignoring and then attacking his ideas. He wants to contribute to curing the planet’s problems and simply wants to be heard even if his proposals are unpopular. There is too much focus on the narrator’s personal life (his mother, Alzheimer’s disease, etc) and this takes away from the central ideas being presented. We get the point Mr. Lomborg, you are a wonderful human being and are largely altruistic and flawless!

The necessary discourse about Al Gore and global warming hits on a much needed history of climate change legislation. Specifically, Kyoto came with promises of lowered emissions that were never met. The cost of reduction at the time seemed astronomical and the results would have been a mere .0008 of one degree Feirenheit. Bjorn also asserts that spending billions of dollars on disease research is foolish. He is trying to convince us that the current approaches to solving these life defining global problems are broken beyond repair and budgets allocated to solving them are more bloated than a pot belly pig. Essentially, Bjorn asks “is there a smarter way forward?” Yet, in this documentary he does not offer a viable alternative.

I cannot help but to love the Obama quote that he attends climate control conferences “not to talk but to act.” The President is indeed a wonderful actor. Not an historical actor, just an actor. He could win infinite Academy Awards for his speeches to the American people. Bjorn illuminates the ins and outs of Cap and Trade legislation and corrupt it can become. Making money through de-carbonization is fine says one expert, except that carbon permits allow for massive profits in the billions if governments mandate policies that increase energy costs. Others note that China and India have become rich by burning coal as cheap sources of rich energy. Just because the United States might agree to this lunacy does not mean any other major carbon emitting nation will. In Nairobi Bjorn visited a village suffering from abject poverty. He suggests electricity and industrialization can only happen if energy is consumed. Fossil fuels cause carbon emissions. Without energy futurization and the bettering of an impoverished nation’s quality of life cannot occur.

Bjorn travels around the world asking children and leaders about their ideas for solutions. His interviewees admit predicting sea level changes and rises or decreases in temperature is almost “unscientific” in that there are counterfactual based on our limited knowledge of the true impact of millions of diverse factors impacting or effecting the planet and its variegated ecosystem.

Cool It is refreshing in that I am unconvinced “global warming” is a valid scientific concept. I believe global warming is a political construct designed to curry the favor of seriously paranoid and easy to control populations. The global warming narrative is conveniently internationalists and pro developing nations. It seeks to diminish the power of America and to promote the communistic sharing of our resources with those parts of the world that would share none with us. It also benefits major corporations that seek to profit from our ignorance of scientific realities. However much I appreciate Lomborg’s healthy skepticism and desire to effect major changes in the way the world goes about curing itself of diseases and temperature warming, it must be said that Cool It is one enormous piece of self-aggrandizing propaganda. It spends more time on identifying Bjorn’s critics than it does expatiating on solutions we can believe in and participate in. Very little in the way of serious solutions is presented and one gets the idea that the narrator/author is happy with simply underscoring how wrong, stubborn and ineffective global warming and energy activists are and have been. This is a terrific documentary in concept but a rather uninformative one in practice. Watch it for the concepts but expect to learn very little if anything at all.