The Physics Behind the Spanish Blackout

Climate change is clearly an important global issue, but we are tackling it very badly and our overwhelming focus on reducing carbon emissions also distracts us from many of the world's most pressing problems. What makes it so hard to cut emissions is that CO2 is a byproduct of prosperous economies, and replacing cheap fossil fuels with today's mostly expensive and unreliable green alternatives remains incredibly expensive. An analysis for the government of New Zealand recently showed that achieving carbon neutrality by 2050 would cost the nation 16% of GDP.

Newsweek  Bjorn Lomborg 2012-05-28

A message from Bjørn Lomborg to organizers of the Rio+20 environmental summit: poverty pollutes.

In the wake of Harvey, Irma and Maria, there is intense pressure to use hurricanes to galvanize support toward carbon emissions cuts.

This is unfortunate. The pundits have convinced more than half of Americans of something that is factually wrong.

Hurricane Harvey had no sooner struck in August of this year than the pundits jumped in:

A Politico commentator wrote, “We knew this would happen, decades ago.” Joe Romm at ThinkProgress warned ominously, “Harvey is exactly the kind of off-the-charts hurricane we can expect to see more often because of climate change.”