Climate activism diverts funds from poverty relief

2013-05-05 We are all brought up to recycle paper to save trees. We get countless e-mail admonitions: “Please consider the environment before printing.” Indeed, environmentalism was born with a call to preserve the forests. But now, in the name of saving the planet from climate change, environmentalists are proposing an immense global campaign to cut down and burn trees and scrubs in order to reduce fossil-fuel use. (...) 

COPENHAGEN – Common sense was an early loser in the scorching battle over the reality of man-made global warming. For nearly 20 years, one group of activists argued – in the face of ever-mounting evidence – that global warming was a fabrication. Their opponents, meanwhile, exaggerated the phenomenon’s likely impact – and, as a consequence, dogmatically fixated on drastic, short-term carbon cuts as the only solution, despite overwhelming evidence that such cuts would be cripplingly expensive and woefully ineffective. (...) 

Global warming is a significant, long-term problem. Unfortunately, we’re tackling it with very costly, and very ineffective, feel-good solutions.

Lomborg writes in The Australian that we should instead focus on cost-effective CO2 reductions like shale gas in the short term and green R&D in the long run.