Voters are rejecting climate policy as too costly with negligible results

The concept of trade-offs has become unfashionable. Politicians around the world like to pretend that their choices will bring us nothing but superlative benefits.

Nowhere is this whitewashing more pervasive or accepted than in climate change. There is a prevalent, comforting notion that we can have our cake and eat it too: that cutting carbon need not involve financial sacrifice.

Global warming is a significant, long-term problem. Unfortunately, we’re tackling it with very costly, and very ineffective, feel-good solutions.

Lomborg writes in The Australian that we should instead focus on cost-effective CO2 reductions like shale gas in the short term and green R&D in the long run.

"Climate change has been a key issue at the United Nations General Assembly this week. Meetings at the U.N. about the topic have been taking place during a season of calamitous weather events, including a series of devastating hurricanes.

While he believes that world leaders cannot ignore climate change, Bjorn Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, says he is concerned that precious resources are too often squandered on ineffective solutions, and that aid money could be spent on better interventions that do the most social good."