Green energy: There is a way to beat climate change but COP26 snubbed it

Climate change means more extreme weather: This is a simple, powerful claim that has been pounded into our consciousness for a decade.

From Greenpeace to President Obama to Scientific American, scarcely a weather event happens without someone pointing the finger at global warming and calling for action.

But there are big problems with this simple statement, which are exposed starkly in recent peer-reviewed analysis in the journal Weather, Climate and Society by University of Manchester scientists Vladimir Jankovic and David M. Schultz.

Here in Paris, there are many well-meaning people who believe that we need strong carbon cuts and green energy production subsidies now and for many years to come, to get the world to move towards tackling climate change. But at the same time, these same people argue that solar and wind is already competitive, or that this moment is just around the corner.

Those two arguments are incompatible and many people who seem to be making both points are simply wrong on one or the other.

In an interview with Wall Street Journal editor Paul Gigot, Lomborg points out that even though climate change is one problem we need to fix, the world’s poor have many more urgent concerns of which rich countries, multilateral institutions and even development organizations are losing sight.