Harris Stops Talking About Climate Change

The suburb of Alajo is about as far from the posh hotels of Paris as you could get. But the bureaucrats and politicians here in France are negotiating a climate treaty to ‘help the world’s poorest’ including billions of dollars of guarantees of "climate aid" to developing nations.

I’ve argued in this blog that this kind of aid isn’t what’s wanted. I’ve pointed to a massive global survey of 8 million people showing that people in the world’s poorest countries rank climate policy last after other policy priorities.

Copenhagen wants to be the world’s first CO2-neutral city by 2025. But this initiative, however wonderful it sounds, is little more than a costly vanity project.

After all, the whole accounting exercise works only if others are still using coal and gas that Copenhagen’s unpredictable wind power can replace. If the city's unrealistic assumptions fall short, the financial losses for its inhabitants will be substantial.

Today, 120 world leaders and 30,000 delegates will start arriving in Glasgow for the Cop26 climate change conference. 

Watching from afar will be Bjorn Lomborg, the former Greenpeace activist who, in his acclaimed 2001 book The Skeptical Environmentalist, concluded that the costly measures being dreamed up by politicians, scientists and businessmen have proved next to useless. 

Here, he explains why little has changed.