Lomborg's article at Atlantic's 5 Best Wednesday Columns

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”,...