News that the Trump administration is poised to ask Congress for deep budget cuts to the Energy Department's renewable energy and energy efficiency programs has thus far generated less outrage than the White House’s abandonment of the Paris Climate Treaty, yet has the potential to be far more damaging to efforts to respond to climate change. According to documents obtained by the Washington Post, the White House is seeking to slash the budgets by 72% in fiscal year 2019, which would cut research in fuel efficient vehicles by 82%, bioenergy technologies by 82%, advanced manufacturing by 75%,...

Antipoverty group Oxfam International got a lot of attention for claiming this week that there’s a global “inequality crisis,” but a far more important point is entirely neglected: globally, income distribution is less unequal than it has been for 100 years. The best data on this comes from Professor Branko Milanovic, formerly of the World Bank, now at City University of New York. His research shows that, mostly because of Asia’s incredible growth, global inequality has declined sharply for several decades, reducing so much that the world hasn’t been this equal for more than a century...

For more than a decade, annual data showed global hunger to be on the decline. But that has changed: According to the latest data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) hunger affected 815 million people in 2016, 38 million more than 2015, and malnutrition is threatening millions. Research from my think tank, Copenhagen Consensus, has long helped to focus attention and resources on the most effective responses to malnutrition, both globally and in countries like Haiti and Bangladesh. Unfortunately, there are worrying signs that the global response may be headed...

Freezing temperatures in the U.S. Northeast have pushed up heating costs, creating serious stress for many Americans. Although the rich world’s energy poor are largely forgotten in discussions about climate policies, they bear an unfair burden for well-meaning proposals. That reality is being laid bare this icy winter as energy and electricity prices surge. When we think about energy poverty, we imagine a lack of light in the world’s worst-off nations, where more than one billion people still lack electricity. This is a huge challenge that the world can hope to address as it reduces poverty...

Two years after the Paris climate agreement was signed, the French capital this month again attracted the world’s good and great, who gathered for President Emmanuel Macron’s One Planet Summit. In turns blasting US President Donald Trump for withdrawing from the Paris accord and telling each other that it remains on track, politicians formed a self-congratulatory huddle with celebrity campaigners and business leaders. We should treat such smug bonhomie with caution. Goodwill isn’t enough to stop climate change, and history is littered with well-meaning policies that turned out to be unhelpful...

The follow-up meeting to the 2015 Paris climate accord on Dec 12 will be slightly less impressive than the original. Having dumped the Paris Agreement, US President Donald Trump is going to skip, and China and India are sending ministers instead of their leaders. But we will hear the same defiance coming from Paris as we have heard for the past two years: the Paris Agreement will continue, even without the US. That seems hardly the point, though. The Paris Agreement is supposed to respond to global warming－and its ability to do so has always been overstated. Despite claims it will keep...

In the wake of Harvey, Irma and Maria, there is intense pressure to use hurricanes to galvanize support toward carbon emissions cuts. This is unfortunate. The pundits have convinced more than half of Americans of something that is factually wrong. Hurricane Harvey had no sooner struck in August of this year than the pundits jumped in: A Politico commentator wrote, “We knew this would happen, decades ago.” Joe Romm at ThinkProgress warned ominously, “Harvey is exactly the kind of off-the-charts hurricane we can expect to see more often because of climate change.”

When famine strikes, governments and international donors step in with life-saving aid. And rich countries give more than $130 billion each year not only to feed the starving, but also to build crucial infrastructure and reduce gaps in access to education, health care, and clean water and sanitation worldwide. All of this is vitally important. But one of the most powerful investments the development community could make is not in today’s problems, but in research that will address tomorrow’s challenges. A dollar spent on research and development has been shown consistently to deliver some of...

The concept of trade-offs has become unfashionable. Politicians around the world like to pretend that their choices will bring us nothing but superlative benefits. Nowhere is this whitewashing more pervasive or accepted than in climate change. There is a prevalent, comforting notion that we can have our cake and eat it too: that cutting carbon need not involve financial sacrifice. We hear this rhetoric so often that we almost don’t notice it. In announcing plans to make the UK a global hub for “green finance,” the British minister of state for climate change and industry Claire Perry said, “...

This week, government representatives and policy experts from south and south-west Asia will gather in Kathmandu to discuss the implementation of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. This is a set of targets that determines how much of national governments’ and the international development community’s budgets will be spent between now and 2030. Since the targets were passed in 2015, policy-makers are finding it difficult to deliver the extensive list of 169 different well-meaning ambitions at once. The sustainable development agenda was the result of a well-meaning but...