Ted Nordhaus on how green activists mislead and hold back progress | The Economist

Ted Nordhaus on how green activists mislead and hold back progress | The Economist

• Exaggerating and impractical, the climate movement undermines its cause and everyone suffers, says an environmental writer

"TWELVE YEARS ago, the UN’s climate summit in Copenhagen, COP15...and then videos herself begging the politicians to “please help the world!”

...Therein lies the fundamental tension within the climate movement. 

To acknowledge progress ...—would require abandoning pseudo-scientific claims that hard biophysical boundaries loom, and jettisoning utopian fantasies of global government and a world powered entirely by renewable energy. 

Moreover, it would mean giving up self-flattering notions that the future of humanity hangs on the outcome of an epic struggle between corporations and environmentalists.
...More than a decade after COP15, poor nations are still waiting for the modest pledges of technology transfer and climate-adaptation aid made at Copenhagen. 

Meanwhile, Western nations and development institutions, egged on by the climate movement, will proceed with efforts to choke off virtually all finance for fossil-fuel-based infrastructure in poor countries. 

It’s easy pickings for Western environmentalists, UN functionaries and political leaders alike, and there is no one capable of stopping them.
...Most importantly, a wiser green-activist movement would recognise that when it places Western leaders between impossible demands and the realities of their domestic political economies, it is the poor, not the activist class, that end up paying for it...Read all.