How to tackle global warming - and how not to

How much did climate change cost last year? One major charity says the answer is $US85 billion ($118bn). That claim was repeated by many newspapers — just as it was designed to — yet it is nonsense.

World leaders gathering in New York for the un’s Sustainable Development Goals (sdg) Summit next week will be faced with the entirely predictable failure of their own grand promises.

In the run-up to the 2015 U.N. Climate Change Conference in Paris from Nov. 30 to Dec. 11, rich countries and development organizations are scrambling to join the fashionable ranks of “climate aid” donors. This effectively means telling the world’s worst-off people, suffering from tuberculosis, malaria or malnutrition, that what they really need isn’t medicine, mosquito nets or micronutrients, but a solar panel. It is terrible news.