Why Sexy but Dumb Ideas Crowd Out Unsexy but Smart Ideas – and What we Can Do About It

The author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It, Bjørn Lomborg researches the smartest ways to improve the environment and the world. For this, he was named one of the world’s 100 most influential people by Time Magazine, one of the 75 most influential people of the 21st Century by Esquire magazine, and one of the 50 people who could save the planet by the Guardian newspaper in the UK. He has repeatedly been named one of the top 100 global intellectuals by Foreign Policy.

Bjørn is also a frequent commentator in print and broadcast media and, through his think tank, the Copenhagen Consensus Center, he regularly works with many of the world’s top economists, including several Nobel laureates.

Read Bjorn’s article in this week’s edition of Newsweek, entitled “Poverty Pollutes”:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/05/27/bjorn-lomborg-on-the-rio-green-summit-poverty-pollutes.html

John Tierney writes a science column, Findings, for the New York Times and is the co-author, with the social psychologist Roy Baumeister, of the New York Times best-seller, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength (Penguin Press, 2011), which was named one of Amazon’s Best Books of 2011.

John always wanted to be a scientist but went into journalism because its peer-review process was a great deal easier to sneak through. He previously wrote columns for the Op-Ed page, the Metro section and the Times Magazine. Before that he covered science for magazines such as Discover, Hippocrates and Science 86.