Facebook, other tech giants censor inconvenient facts about climate change

John Kerry's private jet trip across continents to accept a climate award shows that we will never fix climate change with 'just manage with less' slogans.

Kerry is really honestly showing us that you can’t just ask people to cut back on flying, cut back on driving, cut back on heating and cooling the house. Dealing with climate change is a lot harder than the slogans would suggest. And even if we all stopped flying and switched to electric cars, the climate impact would be very small. 

Air quality has improved dramatically in rich countries over the past century. Yet air pollution is still a huge problem, especially in the developing world. It kills about 7 million people each year, accounting for one out of every eight deaths globally. But the most deadly air pollution comes from inside people's houses, because 2.8 billion people still use firewood, dung and coal for cooking and keeping warm, breathing polluted air inside their homes every day.

Trying to showcase climate leadership at the U.N. Climate Summit in Glasgow, President Joe Biden is reaffirming his goal of creating “a carbon pollution-free power sector by 2035 and net-zero emissions economy by no later than 2050.” But that target will be prohibitively expensive. A new Nature study shows that a 95 percent reduction by 2050 — almost within reach of Biden’s net-zero — would cost 11.9 percent of GDP or more than $11,000 for each American every year.