Science Quote by Bjorn Lomborg

“Obviously” is doing a lot of work here. Lomborg opens with a feigned shrug, as if he’s stating a natural law: if you need funding, you need attention. That rhetorical move matters because it preloads the listener with inevitability and mild impatience. The sentence frames advocacy not as a civic act but as a transactional necessity, implicitly nudging us to treat public-facing urgency as a fundraising tactic.

The subtext is a critique of the attention economy wrapped in the cooler vocabulary of incentives. “Any group” flattens distinctions between humanitarian NGOs, research labs, grassroots movements, and corporate lobbies; everyone is rendered a competitor in the same marketplace. “Their issues” is similarly distancing, a phrase that can subtly demote an urgent problem into someone else’s pet cause. The result is a kind of prophylactic skepticism: if you’re hearing about it, it might be because they need money.

Contextually, this aligns with Lomborg’s broader posture as a data-first contrarian in climate and development debates, arguing that institutions overstate certain crises to capture scarce resources. Read charitably, he’s describing a real structural pressure: philanthropy and government grants reward visibility, emotional salience, and clean narratives, not necessarily the most cost-effective interventions. Read less charitably, it’s a preemptive immunization against moral claims, encouraging audiences to discount urgency as self-interested marketing.

Why it works is its strategic banality. By presenting a contested critique as “obvious,” the quote invites agreement before scrutiny. It doesn’t have to prove that groups exaggerate; it only has to make the motive plausible. In a culture trained to suspect spin, that’s often enough.