Earth Hour: millions prepare to switch off the lights

Over the past decade, the global elite’s obsession with climate change has taken away from the many other major problems facing the planet — shown most dramatically by the invasion of Ukraine. Western European leaders should have spent the past decade diversifying energy sources and expanding shale gas, instead of shutting down nuclear plants and becoming scarily reliant on Russia. But the looming war is far from the only thing they have managed to ignore.

Last week an extraordinary, scary story made climate headlines around the world: a melting Arctic could release an immense amount of methane that would dramatically increase global warming and cost the world a phenomenal $60tn. Fortunately, it is just a scare story. Of course, if you take an implausibly catastrophic event and run it through an implausibly pessimistic economic model, you can get headlines, but you don’t get good policy. The depressing reality is that current climate policies have failed.

There’s a lot of focus now on the politics of Paris. Will poor countries get the "climate aid" they want? Will China agree to reduce its growth, leaving millions more in poverty, by committing to far-reaching carbon cuts? What will be the wording of the treaty that emerges?

It’s easy to become cynical. Let’s instead take a step back and ask a much more interesting question: what would it take for Paris to succeed? By this, I don’t mean that the delegates manage to sign some kind of treaty. I mean, what would it take for Paris to have a real impact on climate change?