World will go green only when the price is right

Today, 120 world leaders and 30,000 delegates will start arriving in Glasgow for the Cop26 climate change conference. 

Watching from afar will be Bjorn Lomborg, the former Greenpeace activist who, in his acclaimed 2001 book The Skeptical Environmentalist, concluded that the costly measures being dreamed up by politicians, scientists and businessmen have proved next to useless. 

Here, he explains why little has changed.

For three decades, climate campaigners have fought to make fossil fuels so expensive that people would be forced to abandon them. Their dream is becoming reality: Energy prices are spiraling out of control and will soon get even worse. Yet we are no closer to solving climate change.

Lomborg points out that almost everywhere cold deaths outweigh heat deaths. Fortunately, heat deaths are declining in countries with good data, likely because of ever more air conditioning. This is abundantly clear for the United States, which has seen increasing hot days since 1960 affecting a much greater population. Yet, the number of heat deaths has more than halved.