Climate Change Hasn’t Set the World on Fire

While the challenge of climate change is incredibly complex, the climate conversation is often restricted to an overly simplistic scope, with a limited number of acceptable perspectives. The ‘acceptable’ worldview can be reduced to this: Climate change is an existential threat, our most important problem, and we can fix it cheaply with solar and wind energy.

The suburb of Alajo is about as far from the posh hotels of Paris as you could get. But the bureaucrats and politicians here in France are negotiating a climate treaty to ‘help the world’s poorest’ including billions of dollars of guarantees of "climate aid" to developing nations.

I’ve argued in this blog that this kind of aid isn’t what’s wanted. I’ve pointed to a massive global survey of 8 million people showing that people in the world’s poorest countries rank climate policy last after other policy priorities.

COPENHAGEN – Efforts to stem global warming have nurtured a strong urge worldwide to deploy renewable energy. As a result, the use of wind turbines has increased ten-fold over the past decade, with wind power often touted as the most cost-effective green opportunity. According to Connie Hedegaard, the European Union’s commissioner for climate action, “People should believe that [wind power] is very, very cheap.” In fact, this is a highly problematic claim. (...)