Policies Pushing Electric Vehicles Show Why Few People Want One

Are droughts, hurricanes, floods and other natural disasters getting stronger and more frequent? Are carbon dioxide emissions, global temperatures and sea levels putting us on a path for climate catastrophe? Bjorn Lomborg, Director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, breaks down the facts about the environment and shows why the reality of climate change may be very different from what you hear in the media.

Patt Morrison for May 5, 2011

Has Bjorn Lomborg—the poster child of environmental skeptics—changed his climate?

Bjorn Lomborg, Danish environmental academic, infuriated scientists around the world when he published The Skeptical Environmentalist in 2001. The book claimed that overpopulation, destruction of resources, and global warming are not imminent problems. It would be a waste of time, Lomborg wrote, and even detrimental, if countries focused on environmental problems like global warming instead of on bigger problems such as worldwide poverty and disease. (...) 

ast week, a study in the prestigious journal Nature revealed just how much CO₂ increases have greened the Earth over the past three decades. Because CO₂ acts as a fertilizer, as much as half of all vegetated land is persistently greener today. This ought to be a cause for great joy.

Instead, the BBC focused on warning that the paper shouldn’t make us stop worrying about global warming, with threats like melting glaciers and more severe tropical storms. Many other major news outlets did not even report on the study.