Bjorn Lomborg recently gave testimony to the US Senate

2013-06-18 COPENHAGEN – We often hear how the world as we know it will end, usually through ecological collapse. Indeed, more than 40 years after the Club of Rome released the mother of all apocalyptic forecasts, The Limits to Growth, its basic ideas are still with us. But time has not been kind. Limits to Growth warned humanity in 1972 that devastating collapse was just around the corner. But, while we have seen financial panics since then, there have been no real shortages or productive breakdowns. Instead, the resources generated by human ingenuity remain far ahead of human consumption.

At his recent World Leaders Climate Summit, President Biden repeated his claim that climate change presents an "existential threat."

This pervasive climate alarmism is the culmination of persistent eco-anxiety over the past decades. Already in 1982, the United Nations was predicting that climate change along with other environmental concerns could cause a worldwide “devastation as complete, as irreversible as any nuclear holocaust” by the year 2000. Needless to say, that didn’t happen.

Despite intense climate worries, electorates have been unwilling to spend the trillions needed to cut emissions dramatically. That is why climate campaigners have increasingly pursued a new strategy by forcing climate policy through courts. Across the world, the UN now counts at least 1550 such climate cases in 38 countries, including Australia, often filed by young people invoking a fear for their ­future. Unfortunately, such cases undermine democracy, harm the poor, and sidetrack us from smarter ways to fix the climate.