More people die of cold: Media’s heat-death climate obsession leads to lousy fixes

Climate change is a practical problem, not a moral one Has ‘skeptical environmentalist’ and scourge of Greenpeace Bjorn Lomborg really had a change of heart and turned green? Er, no, he tells spiked. Rob Lyons ‘“Skeptical environmentalist” and critic of climate scientists to declare global warming a chief concern facing world’, declared the front page of a British broadsheet newspaper in August this year. It suggested that recent comments made by the Danish author Bjorn Lomborg were ‘an apparent U-turn that will give a huge boost to the embattled environmental lobby’. (...) 

Copenhagen Consensus President Bjorn Lomborg says it’s “immoral” to tell the poor world not to use fossil fuels.

“Of course, they want to do the same thing,” he told Sky News host Chris Smith.

“India, Africa, want to do what China did.”

If you listen to the media, a green automotive future has arrived and a tsunami of electric cars is out­selling petrol and diesel around the world, transforming the planet and solving climate change.

We need a reality check. Battery-powered electric vehicles are fairly popular in urban China and California, as well as a few countries that heavily subsidise their drivers. But globally, fewer than 0.3 per cent of all cars are pure electric, and across Europe, BMW says, customers don’t want them.