Despite what activists say, the planet is not on fire

On the sidelines of the 2015 Paris climate summit, then-UK prime minister David Cameron and 19 other world leaders made a promise to double green energy research and development by 2020.

The United Kingdom is on course to break that promise. As a percentage of GDP, spending on low-carbon energy R&D has stayed sluggishly around 0.02 per cent since 2015, according to data from the International Energy Agency (IEA).

Lomborg participated in the Weather Report panel, Apr 29 in New York. You can watch the entire event online. Lomborg's part of the talk starts at 33 minutes in. 

Climate change is clearly an important global issue, but we are tackling it very badly and our overwhelming focus on reducing carbon emissions also distracts us from many of the world's most pressing problems. What makes it so hard to cut emissions is that CO2 is a byproduct of prosperous economies, and replacing cheap fossil fuels with today's mostly expensive and unreliable green alternatives remains incredibly expensive. An analysis for the government of New Zealand recently showed that achieving carbon neutrality by 2050 would cost the nation 16% of GDP.