Equal Access to Health Care

In a world prone to fickle media attention to short-term crises, we often neglect to consider a long-term game plan for humanity. But right now the world’s 193 governments are gearing up to set our priorities for the next decade and a half at the United Nations’ annual meeting in September 2015. This is a debate worth having, but almost no one has heard anything about it.

2013-07-01 The World Bank offers a shoddy climate catastrophe in its latest report. It is depressing the World Bank has embraced this worst-case thinking in a series of highly tendentious reports, co-written by Germany's leading doomsayer Schellnhuber and Bill Hare, long-term Climate Policy Director for Greenpeace. The report estimates that temperatures will increase 0.7°C in about 20 years (by the 2030s, page 22). This is far outside the current reality. It is almost twice as the rate of temperature increase over the past 160 years.

What is the point of climate change policy? To make the world a better place for all of us, and for future generations.

In my new book, False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet, I analyze a lot of ways to make smart climate policy—and many that unfortunately waste resources. But we also need to ask ourselves the broader question: If the goal is to make the world a better place, is climate change policy the most important thing to focus on?