The realistic solution to climate change

Bjorn Lomborg

New York Post

“Pseudo-scientific hysteria is the wrong answer to climate change,” said Bjorn Lomborg. Democratic presidential candidates are sounding warnings that if the U.S. doesn’t dramatically cut carbon emissions by 2030, it will be too late and the world will become a hellish dystopia. Climate change is a real problem, but efforts to get rid of fossil fuels have largely failed. Of the 195 signatories to the 2016 Paris Agreement, just 17 are meeting their modest, self-assigned targets. Why? “Policies to cut carbon are incredibly expensive.” The annual costs of promises in the Green New Deal, for example, would total about $2 trillion, or about $6,400 for every American. Activists think the only way to sell these costs “is by scaring people silly”—but it’s not working. A new poll found that nearly seven of every 10 Americans oppose spending just $120 each a year to combat climate change. The only pragmatic way to address climate change is to pour resources into energy research, to drive down the price of existing renewables and create new energy technologies. When the alternatives become “cheaper than coal and oil, everyone will switch.” It is innovation, not hysteria, that will win this battle.

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