Dr. Bjørn Lomborg and Fraser Institute have published a series of essays with evidence regarding policies intended to mitigate climate change. Excerpts below with links to papers supporting the following conclusions.

Climate Change: A Fact-Based Assessment of Costs, Trade-Offs, and Results is a new multimedia research and educational project by the Fraser Institute in collaboration with Dr. Bjørn Lomborg’s Copenhagen Consensus. It offers Canadians a data-driven analysis of the real risks posed by climate change, and measures the substantial costs and trade-offs that accompany many climate policies.

Electricity prices across Canada up 88% since 2000,
slowing economic growth and denying
Canadians greater prosperity

The essays include:

• Climate Change Is One Policy Concern Among Many: Canadians, like people everywhere, confront a multitude of pressing challenges: soaring housing costs, strained health care, opioid crises, and economic insecurity amid global turbulence. Climate change is undeniably one issue among many—but after years of apocalyptic warnings that the world is about to end, or that rising temperatures signal imminent, irreversible doom, the public is tuning out.

• We Are Hyping Up Rising Heat Deaths, but Ignoring Declining Cold Deaths: While rising temperatures explain a 6.0 per cent increase in heat deaths globally, deaths from cold have declined 40 per cent because of rising temperatures.

• No, the Planet Is Not on Fire: In the early 2000s, roughly three percent of the world’s land surface burned annually, but by 2022, only 2.17 per cent burned, and in 2025, it was 2.2 per cent.

• Are Natural Disasters Increasing Because of Climate Change?: Once we correct for population increases and increased wealth over time, the data show a clear decreasing trend in both human and economic vulnerability from natural disasters, with global average mortality down 6.5 times and economic loss rates declining five times from 1980–1989 to 2007–2016.

• Despite Alarmist Claims, We’re Actually Growing More Food Than Ever Before: Since 1990, the average number of children dying from malnutrition has declined dramatically from 6.5 million to 2.5 million each year. The World Health Organization expects the decline to continue—even with climate change—with annual deaths projected to halve once again by 2050.

• Wind and Solar Power Are Unreliable and Therefore Expensive: The more a country relies on solar and wind, the higher electricity prices become for both households and businesses. In nations with little or no solar and wind, the weighted average price sits around 16 Canadian cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh). For every additional 10 percentage points of solar and wind in the electricity mix, prices rise by slightly more than three cents.

• Electric Cars Do Little for the Climate: Manufacturing EVs generates emissions—especially producing the battery—which requires a large amount of energy, mostly achieved with coal in China. Just as importantly, the carbon footprint of an electric vehicle depends heavily on how the electricity used to charge it is produced.

• The Reality of the Energy Transition: Not Happening: Over the past half-century, the global energy produced from oil and coal has doubled, while hydro power has tripled, and gas has quadrupled, all the while there’s been an explosion in the use of nuclear, solar and wind.

• Abundant, Affordable Energy Is Key to Economic Growth and Prosperity: A 10 per cent increase in energy prices reduced economic growth by about 0.15 percentage points over the 1960 to 2016 period, and yet, across Canada energy prices have increased 88 per cent nationwide since 2000.

• Climate Policy Fixation Blinds Us to Solutions That Actually Improve Human Lives: Instead of reducing emissions in high-income countries, which at best would slow global temperature increases by 0.1 degree Celsius by 2100, people in developing countries would benefit much more from programs to combat diseases, improve nutrition, and improve education.

Explore the Climate Change Essays

Related Article Financial Post Nov. 3 Climate change is a problem—not the end of the world