Revenge of the Climate Realists

2013-06-18 COPENHAGEN – We often hear how the world as we know it will end, usually through ecological collapse. Indeed, more than 40 years after the Club of Rome released the mother of all apocalyptic forecasts, The Limits to Growth, its basic ideas are still with us. But time has not been kind. Limits to Growth warned humanity in 1972 that devastating collapse was just around the corner. But, while we have seen financial panics since then, there have been no real shortages or productive breakdowns. Instead, the resources generated by human ingenuity remain far ahead of human consumption.

As you might expect, the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris, which reached an agreement yesterday to limit the rise in global temperature to less than 2C, has been an international festival of hot air.

The bland, suburban conference centre hosting the two weeks of talks is populated by oversized animal cut-outs – a blue giraffe, a red camel – that we attendees use as landmarks to find our way around.

Human ingenuity is the best climate policy.

Bjorn Lomborg seeks to bring a balanced and thoughtful view to the climate conversation, where alarmist narratives have created policies that do more harm than good.

As Bjorn says, “yes there are problems ahead, but we make more solutions than problems.” The results of one-sided storytelling are unrealistic ‘net-zero’ climate policies which drive up energy prices and carry costs that vastly outweigh their benefits.

We are simply, in Bjorn’s words, “making the lifeblood of civilisation more expensive.”