Science Quote by Bjorn Lomborg

Lomborg’s move here is to reframe climate urgency as a question of timing and price discipline, not moral emergency. By calling long-term thinking “the second thing,” he signals a technocratic checklist: climate policy is a management problem, best handled by optimizing investments, not by rallying society into rapid sacrifice. The line “There is something wrong with saying...” is rhetorical judo. It paints immediate renewable deployment as an impulsive slogan - emotionally satisfying, economically naive - and positions his skepticism as the sober adult in the room.

The subtext is that premature spending is the real sin: if renewables are “incredibly expensive,” then pushing them now risks backlash, wasted capital, and lost political goodwill. That argument doesn’t just critique costs; it critiques a whole style of climate politics that treats speed as virtue. It quietly swaps the activist’s narrative (“act now”) for an R&D narrative (“invent better, cheaper tools”), implying that the most responsible climate policy might be to delay mass adoption until technology improves.

Context matters because Lomborg built a public identity as the contrarian environmentalist: not denying climate change outright, but disputing the prioritization, proposing cost-benefit calculus, and favoring innovation over mandates. The quote works because it exploits a real tension: governments do botch rollouts and voters do punish price hikes. It also reveals its vulnerability: long-termism can be prudence, or it can be a respectable form of procrastination dressed up as fiscal realism.