By Tilak Doshi

In a commentary article in the Financial Post on Tuesday, Bjørn Lomborg argues that Net Zero is “on its way out”, as politicians across the world face up to the high cost and tiny climate returns of raising energy prices. With voters “weary of soaring energy bills and annoyed by increasingly hysteric and patronising climate rhetoric”, governments from the US to UK, Germany to Australia are waking up to the “simple truth”: “aggressive Net Zero mandates are delivering economic pain for unmeasurable and far-off climate gain”. Lomborg senses “a new pragmatism” entering the climate debate.

Lomborg takes the example of United Kingdom, whose Net Zero law enacted in 2019 committed it to zero emissions by 2050. “Hailed as bold leadership, its reality has been economic sabotage” as the UK’s industrial electricity prices surged at four times the increase in the US — leaving the UK with the highest power rates in the Western world.

While Prime Minister Keir Starmer is reportedly preparing to delay or dilute key green commitments to curb “voter revolt”, Reform UK, leading the national polls by far, promises to end Net Zero targets when the party comes to power. Kemi Badenoch, leader of the Conservatives, pledged in 2025 to repeal the Climate Change Act. Lomborg notes the retreat from penurious green policies in the EU, Germany, Australia, Japan and even in Democrat states in the US.

So how does the Western painful dalliance with Net Zero end, according to Lomborg? He finds promise in the about-turn declared by philanthropist Bill Gates who seems to have had an epiphany about the costs of Net Zero. Lomborg is on the same page as Gates. In his long memo ahead of the COP30 climate summit, Gates called for attending states to face up to “three tough truths”: climate change is serious but “will not lead to humanity’s demise”, temperature is not the best measure of progress, and our best defences against climate change are better health and increased prosperity.

What can governments – made more “pragmatic” in the face of voter revolts – do in response to all the money wasted on futile Net Zero policies which cost far more than their presumed (and speculative) long-term ‘benefits’? Lomborg, like Gates, is a techno-optimist, and he sees hope in government-funded research “to achieve breakthroughs in nuclear, carbon capture, geo-engineering and far more efficient green-energy generation and storage”.

The Lomborg Conundrum
Bjørn Lomborg occupies a curious and increasingly uncomfortable position in the climate wars. To climate activists, he is a dangerous heretic who undermines the urgency of ‘The Science’ by questioning the costs of Net Zero. To many skeptics, he is a frustrating near-ally who dismantles the climate policy edifice brick by brick — only to stop short of questioning its foundations.

Lomborg insists that climate change is real, that CO2-driven warming is a problem and that humanity must ultimately ‘solve’ it. Yet he also argues, persuasively, that the costs of current climate policies vastly exceed their benefits, and that trillions are being squandered on symbolic decarbonisation while far more urgent human needs go unmet.

This intellectual tension — between scepticism about policy and faith in the premise — defines Lomborg’s conundrum. He rightly rejects Net Zero as economically ruinous but still accepts the moral framing that elevates man-made CO2 to a civilisational threat in the first place. He denounces coercive regulation and carbon taxes but places hope in large-scale, government-funded research and development to deliver future technological salvation. In doing so, Lomborg offers a critique that is incisive but incomplete — and ultimately justifying the very climate orthodoxy he seeks to reform.

Lomborg’s most valuable contribution has been to puncture the illusion that climate mitigation is a ‘free lunch’ or ‘win-win’. He draws on the work of William Nordhaus, the Nobel prize winning economist who is well known for “integrating climate change into long-run macroeconomic analysis”. Lomborg treats climate change as a long-term economic externality whose damages, while real, are modest relative to the benefits of growth. The central error of Net Zero policies, he argues, is not that they fail to reduce emissions but that they impose crushing costs today for vanishingly small benefits decades hence.

Events have vindicated Lomborg, at least as far as the costs are concerned. The green consensus is unravelling across Europe under the weight of high energy prices, deindustrialisation and voter revolt. Britain’s political class, once united in climate sanctimony, now speaks openly of delaying or diluting Net Zero commitments. Australia’s centre-Right Liberal party and Japan’s new PM Sanae Takaichi are retreating from official Net Zero targets. Even the Tony Blair Institute has urged suspending carbon taxes on gas in the name of cheaper power.

What was sold as ‘green growth’ has now revealed itself as no growth.

Lomborg has been clear-eyed about this retreat, describing it not as moral failure but as political reality. He notes that governments are discovering that climate virtue cannot be eaten, worn or used to heat homes. The lived experience of voters has finally punctured the abstractions of climate modelling. On this terrain, Lomborg, the sceptical environmentalist has done more than most to restore economic realism to a debate long dominated by moral theatrics.

Yet for Lomborg this retreat from Net Zero seems merely tactical. The destination — deep decarbonisation — remains appropriate, only the route is wrong. This insistence is where his analysis begins to raise questions among others who also call themselves sceptics.

Techno-Optimism and the Mirage of State-Led Innovation
If Lomborg’s critique of Net Zero is grounded in economics, his proposed alternative rests on faith in the powers of planners. He repeatedly returns to the same solution: massive public investment in research and development to deliver breakthroughs in clean energy.

Advanced nuclear, carbon capture and storage, better batteries, green hydrogen, even geoengineering — all are invoked by Lomborg as future tools that will make decarbonisation cheap, painless and politically palatable. Lomborg has consistently advocated government investments in green R&D. He even cites studies that purport to show that “every dollar invested in green R&D could prevent $11 in long-term climate damages, making it arguably the most effective global climate policy available”.

Lomborg aligns closely with Bill Gates whose own climate evangelism has undergone a tactical rebranding in recent years. Gates, like Lomborg, rejects degrowth and hair-shirt austerity. He promises instead that innovation — funded and guided by governments — will square the circle between climate goals and prosperity. The link between Gates, who holds himself out as a private philanthropist, and the Lomborg solution of private-public funding of large-scale environmental R&D came under stress as the Trump administration’s DOGE initiatives began to bite.

With the end of USAID and its folding into the State Department, Gates went on record to blame the end of USAID, saying: “The things USAID fund – I fund.” Bill Gates isn’t happy about DOGE cutting funding to projects he’s also involved in. This, some would say, should tell you all you need to know.

But this shared techno-optimism is precisely where Lomborg’s brand of environmental scepticism deserts him. The history of state-directed innovation is not one of elegant breakthroughs and timely miracles. It is a history of misallocated capital, political capture, crony capitalism and technological white elephants. Governments do not ‘pick winners’; they subsidise incumbents, entrench failures and reward those best able to navigate bureaucracies rather than markets. More often than not, it is losers who pick governments.

Take the example of the Ivanpah solar power project, one of the most expensive green energy projects ever undertaken in American history, costing $2.2 billion to build. Benjamin Zycher of the American Enterprise Institute put the promise of the solar power project in California’s Mojave Desert this way:

It was the future. It would demonstrate how to save the planet. It would produce electricity clean and cheap and immune to the vagaries of international shifts in prices, interest rates, currency exchange values and the caprice of foreign governments. It was a demonstration of the massive achievements possible from public-private ‘partnerships’, that is, central planning American style.

After failing to meet its targets, it is set to shut down in 2026 “after eating up massive amounts of taxpayer dollars and killing thousands of birds”.

Britain’s disastrous carbon capture and storage (CCS) project offers another case in point. After decades and billions in subsidies, the technology remains commercially marginal, energy-hungry and dependent on permanent public support. Grid-scale batteries face material constraints that no amount of funding can wish away, as the example of Massachusetts shows. GM, Ford, and other big car makers are “waving white flags” after huge losses and layoffs from their electric vehicle ventures.

These are not failures of imagination or underfunding. They are constraints imposed by the very nature of public sector funding. Lomborg understands these realities when he criticises climate policy mandates. Yet he suspends disbelief when the same political systems are recast as benevolent patrons of innovation.

The Premise Lomborg Will Not Abandon
This is the heart of Lomborg’s conundrum. He accepts that climate change is “a problem”, even as he shows repeatedly that it is dwarfed by other challenges and grossly inflated by policy responses. He argues that adaptation is cheaper than mitigation, that growth saves lives and that energy poverty kills far more people than climate variability.

Yet he stops short of asking the obvious question: if the man-made CO2 problem is small, distant and manageable, why must it remain central at all?

Across the Atlantic, under Donald Trump, the United States has answered that question bluntly. Climate alarmism has been labelled a hoax, international climate institutions such as the IPCC and the UNFCC defunded, Paris-style multilateralism abandoned. Whatever one thinks of Trump’s rhetoric, the underlying shift reflects a broader reassessment: climate policy has delivered higher costs, lower resilience and no measurable climatic benefit.

Lomborg watches this reversal with a mixture of admiration and unease. He welcomes the rejection of Net Zero but not the rejection of climate exceptionalism itself. He wants climate policy to be cheaper, smarter — but still morally privileged.

A more thoroughgoing realism, as put across by President Trump in his speech to the UN, would go further. It would recognise that modest warming (whatever its cause) is not an existential threat. It would abandon global temperature targets as technocratic fantasies. It would prioritise energy abundance, resilience and adaptation over decarbonisation. And it would treat climate as one variable among many in the complex equation of human welfare.

Lomborg has performed a valuable service in exposing the economic wreckage of Net Zero and the hollowness of green utopianism. But by clinging to the premise that climate change must ultimately be “solved” through policy-directed and publicly funded innovation, he gives credence to the very worldview he criticises. His halfway house reassures moderates, comforts elites, and irritates activists — while leaving untouched the deeper error that made Net Zero plausible in the first place.

Until that premise is confronted, Lomborg will remain an ambiguous figure – demonised by climate ideologues, praised by pragmatists, yet tethered to an idea whose time seems to have quietly passed.

Originally published in Daily Sceptic on January 27, 2026.

Dr Tilak K. Doshi is the Daily Sceptic‘s Energy Editor. He is an economist, a member of the CO2 Coalition and a former contributor to Forbes. Follow him on Substack and X.