The European Union is offering Democrat-led states a cautionary tale in how to hamstring an entire economy in the name of green dogma — while failing to solve climate change.

Blue states are sending delegates to Europe to learn how to implement climate policies, egged on by progressive think-tanks. But Europe, which has pursued “green” policies more fervently than even California, is a model of what not to do.

Across the United States and Europe, the media are warning of dangerously high temperatures.

“Extreme Heat Is Breaking America,” warns the New York Times. “Lethal heat is Europe’s new climate reality,” adds Politico.

It’s an annual routine: Expect to be inundated with alarming stories about heat domes, heat deaths and heat waves, pointing to the urgency of climate action.

But this narrative will tell you only a misleading fraction of the story.

By refusing to prioritise, the UN ensured none of their goals would succeed

The international development system is in disarray. Aid budgets have been slashed in the UK and abroad, USAID has been gutted, and the development banks like the World Bank divert ever more of their funding to climate even as global poverty reduction has slowed.

Freer trade has costs, especially in rich countries. But its benefits are seven times greater — and 95 times greater in poor countries

Rather than following the West’s costly policies, low-carbon innovation, climate adaptation and poverty alleviation as well as additional investments in areas like maternal and newborn health and agricultural R&D are keys to real progress and development toward climate resilience in the developing world, including Indonesia.

Around the world, people are waking up to the benefits of freer trade. After years of free trade fatigue and growing protectionism, a majority of Americans now say the United States should pursue global free trade, while the European Union is striking free trade deals as fast as it can, and even regional geopolitical rivals China, South Korea and Japan have agreed to greater cooperation.

When a grid failure plunged 55 million people in Spain and Portugal into darkness at the end of April, it should have been a wake-up call on green energy. Climate activists promised that solar and wind power were the future of cheap, dependable electricity. The massive half-day blackout shows otherwise. The nature of solar and wind generation makes grids that rely on them more prone to collapse—an issue that’s particularly expensive to ameliorate.

With the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to see that many of the major, doom-laden environmental predictions that gained widespread attention from the 1970s onward turned out to be completely wrong. Alarmists gained media acclaim and public attention for warning that we would quickly run out of most resources, and that overpopulation would lead to a global catastrophe, and even that air pollution would escalate to the point that we would need to wear gas masks outside by the year 1985.

Countries like Germany make a show of their virtue and insist that Africa remain impoverished.

Rich Western nations and their development banks love to parade their climate virtue and wag their fingers at Africa. They insist that the continent leapfrog from no energy to trendy renewables like solar and wind, even as wealthy nations run mostly on fossil fuels. With the biggest voting share in the World Bank, the U.S. has effective veto power over major decisions at the globe’s largest multilateral organization—and the moral duty to put its foot down.

Ask families in Germany and the UK what happens when more and more supposedly “cheap” solar and wind power is added to the national power mix, and they can tell you by looking at their utility bills: It gets far more expensive.