The world is losing the war against climate change

Kill 4 billion people.

I can't help but think that picking apart a magazine's headline is a huge distraction from an important issue, but I also can't help myself in pointing out how off the mark you with such a superficial observation.

As far as global poverty is concerned, between 1990-2013 more than a billion people were lifted out of poverty according to the World Bank. I'm sure you can point to local and anecdotal evidence that does not correlate, but to say efforts to reduce poverty have failed are just flat wrong.

Cancer is an intractably complex disease, but to dismiss all efforts and advancements is also off the mark. Life expectancy for many types of cancers has improved significantly. Oncolytic viruses have been shown to treat some very advanced forms of cancer with profound results.

I wish I could be more optimistic about the war on drugs, so I'll concede that one to you.

If you think the branding of the effort is that terrible and counter productive, I'd love to hear your ideas on how we should brand the effort.

What other title would you give it instead, then?

> ...seems to me that their environmentalism is not entirely sincere.

That's my problem with the entire political side of climate and environmentalism. The simple fact that Al Gore flies in a Learjet while simultaneously claiming the "Earth has a fever." Makes it impossible for me to take that movement seriously. Even if he buys "carbon credits" -- that carbon he's generating is still being generated. You can't dump mercury in a river and then pay a bunch of money and pretend mercury wasn't dumped in a river.

The Paris Climate talks -- Anyone have a look at the tarmac at Le Bourget? Delegations of essentially anonymous officials arriving via private jets and being shuttled around by private cars while suggesting that I should make my house hotter by turning up the air conditioner temperature or I should pay more to take my kids to school each morning. And they're flying private? They're actually having an in-person meeting at all? If the threat were so dire, then why not video conference? Or at the very least fly commercial and take public transit.

Even Bill and Hilary have flown commercial -- so arguments about the feasibility of that aren't very valid. Certainly random environmental officials where nobody even knows their names, let alone faces aren't subject to any special security requirements that would necessitate private jets. They do it because they see themselves as more important than those that they would regulate. It's Animal Farm where some animals are more equal than others.

To be clear, I'm not debating any particular scientific position -- I'm just suggesting that many people (like me) have a hard time reconciling how "dire" our situation is when the supposed "experts" aren't making any changes to their own lifestyle unless it's politically expedient. Personally, I try to live a low-impact lifestyle when possible. I don't waste water, I use programmable thermostats, I reuse when possible and I don't drive if it's easy to take public transit or company shuttles. However, my adherence to a reasonably green lifestyle is offset 1000 fold when some factory in China dumps benzene in the water or some Delhi trucker fills the air with dense smoke while idling in traffic for hours.

It might seem to an skeptical observer that the anti-carbon political movement might be more about controlling/profiting from/reallocating the means of production more than helping the actual environment. The implication that people on the far left care more about the environment seems to be good marketing -- people on the far left seem to care more about far left economics than the environment -- the environment is just good populist toast upon which to serve a marmalade of collectivist economic policy.

It seems that most normal people, right and left, care about the environment. For me though (on the libertarian side of the aisle,) when I hear stuff like this, from former United Nations climate official Ottmar Edenhofer:

"One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with the environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole," said Edenhofer, who co-chaired the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change working group on Mitigation of Climate Change from 2008 to 2015.

When I hear stuff like that, then that discredits a lot of the climate alarmism in my mind -- despite the fact that I actually do care deeply about the environment.

Cheap energy goes a long way toward solving those problems. Many "rare" materials are only rare because they're energy intensive to extract, or they might not be needed at all (e.g. rare earth metals in motors and batteries) if we can afford to sacrifice energy efficiency in products. If we can irrigate all the deserts with desalinated sea water then there's less need for intensive agriculture. Pollution control technologies need energy to run and build, so cheaper energy means there's less opposition to using them.