The World, Energy, and Climate – Purdue Convocations Presidential Lecture Series

The UN climate summit is underway in Madrid, and activists are sounding their usual calls for world leaders to achieve carbon neutrality as fast as possible. It’s a fool’s errand.

From California to France to Chile, environmentalists laud leaders for already making the promise, and sometimes even passing legislation, to stop putting more greenhouse gases into the air than they take out.

Op-ed by Bjørn Lomborg in Project Syndicate.

The Doha meeting continued 20 years of failed climate negotiations, since the original Earth Summit in Rio in 1992. There, countries pledged to cut greenhouse-gas emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2000; the OECD countries fell short by almost 9%. The Kyoto Protocol from 1998 has almost entirely failed. And the effort intended to save the world in Copenhagen in 2009 collapsed spectacularly. 

To tackle climate change, rich nations are promising to end fossil fuel use in 29 years. As this becomes excruciatingly costly, the G7 is now thinking about making the world’s poor pay for it. That’ll go badly.