Japan leads the way on a smarter climate policy

For the past 30 years, the global approach to climate policy has been making grand promises and later mostly failing to live up to them. At his World Leaders Climate Summit, President Biden promised to cut about twice as much carbon as what Obama promised, which was hailed as decisive and bold climate action.

"Climate change has been a key issue at the United Nations General Assembly this week. Meetings at the U.N. about the topic have been taking place during a season of calamitous weather events, including a series of devastating hurricanes.

While he believes that world leaders cannot ignore climate change, Bjorn Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, says he is concerned that precious resources are too often squandered on ineffective solutions, and that aid money could be spent on better interventions that do the most social good."

When a “solution” to a problem causes more damage than the problem, policymaking has gone awry. That’s where we often find ourselves with global warming today.

Activist organizations like Worldwatch argue that higher temperatures will make more people hungry, so drastic carbon cuts are needed. But a comprehensive new study published in Nature Climate Change led by researchers from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis has found that strong global climate action would cause far more hunger and food insecurity than climate change itself.