Ban the Beef?

John Kerry's private jet trip across continents to accept a climate award shows that we will never fix climate change with 'just manage with less' slogans.

Kerry is really honestly showing us that you can’t just ask people to cut back on flying, cut back on driving, cut back on heating and cooling the house. Dealing with climate change is a lot harder than the slogans would suggest. And even if we all stopped flying and switched to electric cars, the climate impact would be very small. 

...The question is, what comes next? The author of the Copenhagen Consensus (not to be confused with December's Copenhagen summit), Danish economist Bjorn Lomborg, has talked about a "third way" forward: acknowledging that climate change is real, but pursuing a cost-benefit approach that would commit countries to projects that yield the greatest benefits for the greatest number of people. "I've read Lomborg," Mr. Ramesh says with a smile. "I don't think you should dismiss Lomborg the way climate evangelicals have dismissed him. He makes reasonable points.

ast week, a study in the prestigious journal Nature revealed just how much CO₂ increases have greened the Earth over the past three decades. Because CO₂ acts as a fertilizer, as much as half of all vegetated land is persistently greener today. This ought to be a cause for great joy.

Instead, the BBC focused on warning that the paper shouldn’t make us stop worrying about global warming, with threats like melting glaciers and more severe tropical storms. Many other major news outlets did not even report on the study.