Bjorn Lomborg: ‘How green policies hurt the poor’ – ‘Cold? Hungry? Short of cash? You can always eat carbon credits’

Yet most Westerners still want to focus on putting up more inefficient solar panels in the developing world. But this infatuation inflicts a real cost. A recent analysis from the Centre for Global Development shows that $10 billion invested in such renewables would help lift 20 million people in Africa out of poverty. It sounds impressive, until you learn that if this sum was spent on gas electrification it would lift 90 million people out of poverty. So in choosing to spend that $10 billion on renewables, we deliberately end up choosing to leave more than 70 million people in darkness and poverty.

In the West, we take our supply of electricity for granted. After a century, we’ve forgotten that plentiful, affordable and dependable energy is the lifeblood of modern civilisation and prosperity. Discussions about saving the world seldom acknowledge the 1.3 billion people living without any electricity whatsoever. Their problems seem otherworldly to us — and we neglect the fact that the same sort of access to cheap electricity would substantially improve their lives. When it comes to helping the world’s poor, a topic like climate change seems to interest the West far more than such mundane matters as helping them power their houses.…

Flashback 2007: Former Czech Pres. Vaclav Klaus: ‘As someone who lived under communism for most of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism’

Full Klaus 2007 article here.

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It was never about the science:

EU Commissioner: Global Warming Policy Is Right Even If Science Is Wrong — ‘Regardless of whether or not scientists are wrong on global warming, the European Union is pursuing the correct energy policies even if they lead to higher prices, Europe’s climate commissioner Connie Hedegaard’s has said.’ — EU’s Hedegaard in 2013: ‘Let’s say that science, some decades from now, said ‘we were wrong, it was not about climate’, would it not in any case have been good to do many of things you have to do in order to combat climate change?.’

Flashback: 1993: Former U.S. Senator Timothy Wirth: ‘We’ve got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing, in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.’

Hedegaard in 2013: ‘I think we have to realize that in the world of the 21st century for us to have the cheapest possible energy is not the answer.’

Flashback 1975: Obama Science Czar John Holdren Says Real Threat to USA Is Cheap Energy: ‘The U.S.is threatened far more by the hazards of too much energy, too soon, than by the hazards of too little energy, too late.’

Flashback: UN IPCC Official Edenhofer: ‘We Redistribute World’s Wealth By Climate Policy’

Flashback 2007: Former Czech President Vaclav Klaus: ‘As someone who lived under communism for most of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism…This ideology wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning.’

Czech President Vaclav Klaus: Attempting to ‘control climate’ is as ‘irrational, arrogant and pretentious as communist planning that people like me were objects of for so many years’ -March 08, 2010

MIT Climate Scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen: ‘He who controls carbon controls life. It is a bureaucrat’s dream to control carbon dioxide’

Flashback May 2009: Eco-Nanny Pelosi: ‘Every aspect of our lives must be subjected to an inventory’

‘A planned economic recession’: Global warming prof. Kevin Anderson – who has ‘cut back on showering’ to save planet – asserts economic ‘de-growth’ is needed to fight climate change — Anderson: ‘Continuing with economic growth over the coming two decades is incompatible with meeting our international