Saying out loud what many people already think about electric cars, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s climate spokeswoman, Allegra Stratton, has received a lot of green flak. She says she’s not yet willing to trade in her old diesel car for a sparkling new electric, because it is inconvenient for her driving needs. In her honesty, Ms Stratton has highlighted the elitist illusion of much green thinking. The hard truth is that electric cars won't "save the world." Even if all nations achieved all of their ambitious EV targets, emissions will be reduced by about 0.1% by 2030. If this...

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change just released its latest climate report, and reactions from politicians and media pundits could not have been more predictable. Fitting the apocalyptic narrative many have spun lately, the always-breathless Guardian literally summarized this scientific report as finding mankind “guilty as hell” of “climate crimes of humanity.” (Needless to say, the report never says any such things.)

Our current climate conversation embodies two blatantly contradictory claims. On one side, experts warn that promised climate policies will be economically crippling. In a new report, the International Energy Agency (IEA) states that achieving net-zero in 2050 will likely be “the greatest challenge humankind has ever faced.” That is a high bar, surpassing World War II, the black plague and Covid. On the other side, hand-waving politicians sell net-zero climate schemes as a near-utopia that every nation will rush to embrace. As John Kerry, US President Biden’s climate envoy, told world leaders...

Headlines from around the world tell us of hundreds of deaths caused by recent heat waves. The stories invariably blame climate change and admonish us to tackle it urgently. But they mostly reveal how one-sided climate-alarmist reporting leaves us badly informed. The stories contain a kernel of truth: Global warming is a real, manmade problem that needs addressing. As temperatures increase, so will the frequency and severity of heat waves. But the media fail to report the full story and thus lose focus on the most effective ways to help.

Our current climate conversation embodies two blatantly contradictory claims. On one side, experts warn that promised climate policies will be economically crippling. In a new report, the International Energy Agency (IEA) states that achieving net-zero in 2050 will likely be “the greatest challenge humankind has ever faced.” That is a high bar, surpassing the Second World War, the black plague and COVID. On the other side, hand-waving politicians sell net-zero climate schemes as a near-utopia that every nation will rush to embrace. As U.S. climate envoy John Kerry told world leaders gathered...

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, the most available powers came from backbreaking human work. Even by the end of the 1800s, human labor made up 94% of all industrial workers in the US. Today, it constitutes just 8%. If we think of the energy we use in terms of “servants”,...

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 by forcing climate policy through courts. Across the world, the UN now counts at least 1550 such climate cases in 38 countries, including Australia, 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. Since the beginning of climate negotiations, it has been hard to compel...