How to tackle global warming - and how not to

From the news to late-night shows, much of the media makes it sound as if renewables are on the verge of taking over. But that’s far from reality. In 2019, the latest complete year of data, 81% of the world’s energy supply came from fossil fuels, according to the International Energy Agency. Even if all nations were to fulfill their current climate promises, the IEA estimates that fossil-fuel use would still make up 73% by 2040.

2013-09-30 On Friday, the U.N. climate panel, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), produced its first overview in six years. It wasn’t about panic and catastrophe, which unfortunately has dominated our climate debate, leading to expensive but ineffective policies. 

We are frightening children with exaggerations – they believe they don't have a future and that the world is going to end The continuous presentation of scary stories about global warming in the popular media makes us unnecessarily frightened. Even worse, it terrifies our kids. Al Gore famously depicted how a sea-level rise of 20ft (six metres) would almost completely flood Florida, New York, Holland, Bangladesh, and Shanghai, even though the United Nations says that such a thing will not even happen, estimating that sea levels will rise 20 times less than that.