Lomborg: Smart technology enabling

In the BBC News Night they actually asked one of their top reporters to be Ethical Man for a year. He was going to cut his family's carbon emissions: he insulated their house, which was probably smart, sold his car, which turned out to give a lot of problems, didn't go on any holidays, looked into ecological burial, all kinds of stuff. He was pretty harsh. By the end of that one year, he had reduced his carbon emissions by 20 per cent. Which, if everyone in Britain had done that, would have postponed global warming by about half a second. So, you know, not a whole lot of things, but it took a lot of effort. But what was his first reaction after he was done doing this? Well, he was actually very honest and said: "I bought tickets for the whole family to Jamaica." And instantly, he blew the entire savings.
I think this idea of doing good and then binging afterwards is a little bit like dieting: You only eat celery for a while and then you binge out on cakes. It's not the way forward. Telling people: “No, you can't do this,” is never really going to win any converts, it's just going to make everybody very, very tired. This is about coming up with the innovations that will make it possible for us to have all these great things, to fly to Jamaica, but to do so on a plane that will ultimately be powered by non CO2-emitting fuels.