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If you haven’t yet heard of Bjorn Lomborg, you will.  The new documentary COOL IT is touting itself as the solution to the problems depicted in AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH.  Now while there’s still a lot of debate to be had over what will and won’t work in this doc, I must saw what I saw was very compelling, and raises some interesting questions as to why we’re not doing certain things we could be.  I was definitely keen on talking to Lomborg, who I must say is every bit as engaging in real life as he comes across on screen.  My thanks to Carole Smith and the lovely Ann Alexander of the USA Film Festival for making this interview possible.

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Foreign Policy Magazine has just named Bjorn Lomborg one of the 100 Top Global Thinkers of 2010. Last year’s list included people like Ben Bernanke, President Obama, and Gen. David Petraeus, so he is in good company. The 2010 list, which spotlights “remarkable individuals who have shaped the global conversation over the last 12 months—and will continue to do so in coming years,” will be published in the magazine’s December issue.

Bjorn Lomborg is adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School and director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, which brings together some of the world’s top economists, including five Nobel laureates, to suggest priorities for solving the world’s most pressing problems. Time magazine named Lomborg one of the world’s 100 most influential people in 2004. In 2008, he was named “one of the 50 people who could save the planet” by the British newspaper The Guardian, “one of the top 100 public intellectuals” by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazine, and “one of the world’s 75 most influential people of the 21st century” by Esquire.

Lomborg’s 2007 book Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalists Guide to Global Warming, in which he challenged conventional wisdom about the best ways to deal with climate change, is the inspiration behind a documentary film of the same name, directed by Ondi Timoner, that was selected to premiere at the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival.

Lomborg first came to prominence in 2001 with the publication of his best-selling book The Skeptical Environmentalist, in which he argued that while pollution and other environmental woes needed to addressed, real progress had been made and the situation was not nearly as dire as many activists maintained. The book, which led the World Economic Forum to select him as a Global Leader for Tomorrow, inspired intense debate and still provokes strong feelings nearly a decade later.

Ever since then, Lomborg has been a frequent participant in public debate about climate change and global economic priorities. His commentaries have appeared regularly in such publications as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Time, Newsweek, The Economist, Forbes, Le Monde, Toronto Globe & Mail, Washington Post, The Guardian, The Daily and Sunday Telegraph, The Times of London, The Australian, the Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe. He has appeared on TV shows ranging the BBC’s “Newsnight” to HBO’s “Politically Incorrect” as well as CNN’s “Larry King Live,” ABC News’s “20/20,” and Australian Broadcasting’s “60 Minutes.”

Born in Denmark in 1965, Lomborg earned his M.A. and Ph.D. at the Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen. He taught in the Political Science Department of the University of Aarhus from 1994 to 2005. From February 2002 to July 2004 Lomborg was also director of Denmark’s national Environmental Assessment Institute. During this period he was named by Business Week as one of the nine top “agenda setters” in Europe. He organized the first Copenhagen Consensus in 2004, bringing together some of the world’s top economists to prioritize the best solutions to the world’s biggest challenges. Essentially, he asked these experts to tackle the question: With limited resources, how can we do the most good possible? It is a question he continues to ask today.

AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH told us what the problem is; COOL IT will tell you how to solve it.

Al Gore has done a brilliant job of raising awareness about global warming. But when it comes to solutions, he seems more interested in frightening people than in fostering rational discussion.

Global warming is real, it is caused by man-made CO2 emissions, and we need to do something about it. But it’s not going to end the world next year, or even in the next decade. We need to keep this in mind when we think about how to solve it.

Partly because of AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH, we’ve developed this single-minded focus on cutting carbon emissions; that’s certainly one way to stop global warming, but it’s enormously expensive and will take a hundred years to have any real impact.

What my work is about—and what COOL IT will show—is that there are better solutions to global warming, solutions that will cost far less, work more quickly, and have more impact than cutting carbon.

Our goal with COOL IT is to transform the way people think not only about global warming but also about a host of other serious problems. There are many terrible problems—like malaria, the lack of potable water, HIV/AIDS—that we could solve fairly quickly with just a fraction of the money some people would like us to spend on cutting carbon emissions.

If cutting carbon emissions were the only way to save the planet, then perhaps that strategy might make sense. But it’s not the only solution. In fact, of all the possible solutions, cutting carbon costs the most, takes the longest to have any impact, and is the least politically practical.

Why do you think all the big global climate summits—Rio in 1992, Kyoto in 1997, and Copenhagen last month—failed to produce meaningful action? It’s because they all focused on trying to get governments to make drastic cuts in carbon emissions—and that strategy makes neither economic nor political sense.

What I hope people will get from COOL IT is the realization that we must rethink our approach to climate change. if we don’t, we will wind up wasting enormous sums of money on a politically-correct solution that doesn’t really do much good, while hundreds of millions of people suffer and die from problems like malaria and dirty water that we could easily solve.

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COOL IT Synopsis

“Cool It blasts through the polarizing logjam of the climate change debate to bring a solid plan for solutions” – director Ondi Timoner

Climate catastrophe? Normal solar activity? The end of civilization as we know it? Cool It is based upon the book of the same name and lectures by Bjorn Lomborg, the controversial author of The Skeptical Environmentalist. Acclaimed award-winning filmmaker Ondi Timoner travels the world with Lomborg exploring the real facts and true science of global warming and its impact. Lomborg is the founder of the economic think tank, Copenhagen Consensus, which brings together the world’s leading economists to prioritize major global problems — among them malaria, the lack of potable water and HIV/AIDS — based upon a cost/benefit analysis of available solutions. Amidst the strong and polarized opinions within the global warming debate, Cool It follows Lomborg on his mission to bring the smartest solutions to our energy needs, carbon emissions and other major problems in the world.

Release date: November 12th (NY,LA, Top 20 markets) – Additional expansion throughout November

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