The disconnect between the world elite and reality could lead us to chaos

The disconnect between the global elite and the real world is growing by the day. Most people are exhausted by the pandemic, rising food prices, energy prices and general inflation, and worried about the recession. However, the spokesmen of the elites go to the Davos or Aspen conferences to declare that our greatest and immediate threats are climate change, environmental disasters and biodiversity loss.

This ignores the most urgent of our crises. Almost billion people are at risk of starvation this year, a situation that is aggravated by the opposition to fertilizers made with fossil fuels. Over a billion school-age children have lost an average of nine months of learning due to lockdowns during the pandemic, which will cost their generation 1.6 trillion dollars each year until 2040. Millions in the rich world will die unnecessarily of cancer Y heart diseases undiagnosed and ignored by the outbreak of Covid19, while millions more in the poor world will die unnecessarily from malaria and tuberculosis.

Climate change is a real, man-made problem that deserves attention. It is also exaggerated in the media, where each "event" weather becomes a television catastrophe. Last year, the newspapers were filled with stories of devastating hurricanes. However, the year 2021 was the minor number of hurricanes globally since satellites began monitoring in 1980. Hundreds of deaths from heat waves head the news for days, even though the data shows that everywhere many more people die, 4.5 million worldwide, from low temperatures, often due to lack of heating aggravated by high energy prices.

The costs of climate and environmental policies pushed through establishment chat rooms are quickly becoming unbearable. For decades we have been told that ending fossil fuels is costless or even beneficial. Now, we are beginning to see the immense economic and security costs of such unleashed promises. The first reactions took place in France with the revolts of the “yellow vests”.

The Netherlands has been rocked by protests since the government introduced policies that would decimate the agricultural industry in the name of the environment. These policies threaten the production of one of the world’s largest food exporters, just as hunger is increasingbut the government cannot change course because environmentalists have taken legal action to block asymmetric policies.

The situation is even worse in Sri Lanka. Encouraged by elite activists and the World Economic Forum to take an organic approach, the government banned synthetic fertilizers in April 2021. Unsurprisingly, food production plummeted and the currency defaulted. Large-scale protests by hungry and dissatisfied citizens who invaded the presidential palace finally forced the resignation of the government.

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Solving many of these problems is not rocket science. The rich should stop making food more expensive by insisting on organic. They should stop making energy more expensive by imposing renewable energies. Instead, we should increase R&D for better seeds that provide more food with less environmental impact. We should push for advances in green energy that could make drastic CO2 reductions cheap and feasible. And we should include the many other urgent crises that have simple and effective solutions, for example for tuberculosis and for ensuring much better learning in schools around the world with computer-assisted teaching at the right level.

Unfortunately, the elite looks set to double down on the climate and the environment. the policy of "net zero" It will be the most expensive the world has ever embarked on. According to McKinsey, the price of renewable assets and infrastructure will rise to more than 5 trillion dollars annually for the next three decades. This is equivalent to more than a third of global tax revenue.

As in the Netherlands, governments will increasingly be caught between environmentalists, who use legal action to force them to keep their promises, and working families, who cannot afford rising prices.

Even with current policies, EU Vice President Frans Timmermans admits that many millions of Europeans may not be able to heat their homes this winter. This, he concludes, could lead to “very, very strong conflicts and struggles.”

Is right. When people are cold, hungry, and broke, they riot. If the elite continues to push incredibly expensive policies that are disconnected from the urgent challenges facing the majority of the people, we will have to brace ourselves for much more global chaos.

Bjorn Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He has been considered one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine, one of the 75 most influential people of the 21st century by Esquire magazine and one of the 50 people capable of saving the planet by The Guardian newspaper, of the United Kingdom. United. His most recent book in Spanish isFalse alarm: Why panic over climate change won’t save the planet

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