The Net-Zero Debate Turns Orwellian

COPENHAGEN – Despite gains in life expectancy, expanded access to education, and lower rates of poverty and hunger, the world has a long way to go to improve the quality of people’s lives. Almost a billion people still go to bed hungry, 1.2 billion live in extreme poverty, 2.6 billion lack access to clean drinking water and sanitation, and almost three billion burn harmful materials inside their homes to keep warm.

Promoting his climate change film An Inconvenient Sequel, former US vice-president Al Gore likes to say that the nightly news has become “a nature hike through the Book of Revelations”.

He’s not the only one touting an apocalypse. In a much-shared story, New York magazine warned that famine, economic collapse and “a sun that cooks us” will happen as soon as the end of this century, as “parts of the Earth will likely become uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable”.

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO Saving Planet? Global warming is not a current threat but a future one. It will cause more heat deaths, flooding and lower agricultural productivity in hot areas. But it will also result in longer growing seasons, more precipitation and fewer cold deaths in most places. Attempts to terrify people about climate change have backfired. Political posturing by celebrity activists and scientists has undermined years of important work on the matter.