At his recent World Leaders Climate Summit, President Biden repeated his claim that climate change presents an "existential threat." This pervasive climate alarmism is the culmination of persistent eco-anxiety over the past decades. Already in 1982, the United Nations was predicting that climate change along with other environmental concerns could cause a worldwide “devastation as complete, as irreversible as any nuclear holocaust” by the year 2000. Needless to say, that didn’t happen.

Despite intense climate worries, electorates have been unwilling to spend the trillions needed to cut emissions dramatically. That is why climate campaigners have increasingly pursued a new strategy: forcing climate policy through courts. Across the world, the UN now counts at least 1,550 such climate cases in 38 countries and more than a thousand just in the U.S., often filed by young people invoking a fear for their future. Unfortunately, such cases undermine democracy, harm the poor and sidetrack us from smarter ways to fix the climate.

This Earth Day, dramatic warnings about climate change will be ubiquitous. At his climate summit, U.S. President Joe Biden will undoubtedly repeat that global warming presents an “existential threat.” But most of the hype will be vastly exaggerated. This pervasive climate alarmism is the culmination of persistent eco-anxiety over the past few decades. Already in 1982, the United Nations was predicting that, along with other environmental concerns, climate change could cause worldwide “devastation as complete, as irreversible as any nuclear holocaust” by the year 2000. Needless to say, that...

For the past 30 years, the global approach to climate policy has been making grand promises and later mostly failing to live up to them. At his World Leaders Climate Summit, President Biden promised to cut about twice as much carbon as what Obama promised, which was hailed as decisive and bold climate action. This is equivalent to decreasing an additional 1.5 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas annually by 2030 beyond Obama’s commitments. But what would this achieve? Let us assume that Biden and future presidents manage to get emissions cut as promised by 2030. And let us assume miraculously...

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. The rich world has seen an incredible development on the back of enormous increases in mostly fossil fuel energy. A couple of hundred years ago, most available power came from backbreaking human work. Even by the end of the 1800s, human labour made up 94% of all industrial work in the US. Today, it constitutes just 8%. If we think of the energy we use in terms of “servants”, each with...

Across the world, politicians are going out of their way to promise fantastically expensive climate policies. US President Joe Biden has promised to spend US$500 billion each year on climate policies－about 13 percent of the entire federal revenue. And the European Union has vowed to spend 25 percent of its budget to combat climate change. Most rich countries now promise to go carbon neutral by the middle of this century. Shockingly, only one country has made a serious, independent estimate of the cost: New Zealand found it would optimistically cost 16 percent of its GDP by then, equivalent to...

Across the world, politicians are now promising climate policies costing tens of trillions of dollars – money we don’t have and resources that are desperately needed elsewhere. Yet, climate campaigners tell us, if we don’t spend everything on climate now, nothing else matters, because climate change threatens our very civilization. As President Biden says: climate change is "an existential threat".