By Bjorn Lomborg
Thursday, March 19, 2026
Two decades have passed since Al Gore’s movie An
Inconvenient Truth hit theaters, in May 2006, catapulting climate change
into the global spotlight. The film, with its dramatic visuals and dire
warnings, transformed the issue from a niche ecological concern into a
front-page crisis. World leaders in rich countries began labeling it an
“existential threat,” and it dominated international agendas. Gore’s message
especially resonated with the elites who travel by private jet to attend global
conferences, and it inspired a generation of influencers, activists, and
policymakers.
As we approach the film’s 20th anniversary, it’s a time
to reflect on not just its impact but its accuracy. The film’s predictions of
escalating catastrophes have largely failed to materialize, its policy
prescriptions have fallen short, and the $16 trillion currently spent in
pursuit of its vision has delivered scant benefits. An Inconvenient Truth encapsulates
the past two decades of climate debate: heavy on emotion and costs, light on
evidence and benefits.
***
Let’s start with the film’s core narrative: that climate
change is driving ever-worsening disasters. Gore painted a picture of a world
besieged by floods, droughts, storms, and wildfires, with humanity on the
brink.
The data tell a different story. Over the past century,
as the global population quadrupled, deaths from climate-related disasters have
plummeted. In the 1920s, an average of nearly half a million people died
annually from such events. Today, that number is under 10,000 — a decline of
more than 97 percent. This isn’t because disasters have vanished. It’s because
wealthier, more resilient societies have adapted through better infrastructure,
early warnings, and disaster management. Richer, smarter societies have made us
dramatically safer, proving that adaptation and resilience work far better than
alarmists suggest.
Gore’s movie famously warned of vanishing polar bears,
using poignant computer-generated images to suggest they were drowning because
of melting ice. Again, reality is starkly different: Polar bear populations
have increased from around 12,000 in the 1960s to more than 26,000 today,
according to the best available evidence, including from the Polar Bear
Specialist Group under the International Union for Conservation of Nature. The
primary historical threat was overhunting, not climate change. While future warming
poses risks, the apocalyptic narrative is undermined by the data.
Hurricanes were another bogeyman. The film notably
claimed that we would see more frequent and stronger storms; its poster
cunningly showed a hurricane coming out of a smokestack. But global data from
satellites actually show a slight decline in hurricane frequency since 1980.
While Al Gore blamed Hurricane Katrina on climate change, just one year later,
the U.S. began an unprecedentedly long streak of eleven years without major
hurricane landfall. Indeed, the longest reliable data series for landfalling hurricanes
in the U.S. has shown a decline since the year 1900, and major hurricanes are
about as frequent as they were in the past. When adjusted for more people and
more houses, the damages from U.S. hurricanes have declined, not increased.
Wildfires follow a similar pattern. Media hype suggests a
planet ablaze, but global burned area has decreased by 25 percent since 2001,
according to NASA data. Each year, the reduction spares from the flames an area
larger than Texas and California combined.
In the U.S., while recent years have seen large fires,
the 1930s Dust Bowl was five times worse. Fires are down everywhere else in the
satellite era: They’re trending lower in Australia, Europe, and South America;
Asia hit its third-lowest annual burned area, and Africa (the biggest burner by
far) posted its all-time low in 2025. North America’s woes to a large extent
stem from mismanagement: We’ve skipped the prescribed burns that lower
long-term fire risk; a century of this fire suppression has built up undergrowth
fuel and created tinderboxes. Yet this is spun as “climate change,” not policy
failure.
Even CO2 emissions from wildfires are plummeting. The
year 2025 saw the lowest-ever-recorded emissions in the satellite era, down 3
gigatons from early-2000s levels — equivalent to wiping out the annual
emissions of Brazil and Indonesia combined. This undercuts the core argument
that rising global temperatures are supercharging fires and feedback loops of
carbon release.
This decline isn’t new; it’s a century-long pattern
driven by human adaptation. People hate fires, so we prevent them. In the early
1900s, nearly 4 percent of global land burned yearly — two Indias’ worth.
Today, it’s nearly halved, to 2.2 percent, sparing almost one India ablaze
annually. Better land management, farming practices, and fire suppression have
tamed blazes worldwide.
Air pollution from fires follows suit. Globally, reduced
burning means cleaner air. The risk of death from fire-related pollution has
dropped significantly, likely saving tens of thousands of lives yearly,
especially among vulnerable infants.
Global fires are dramatically down, with lower emissions,
pollution, and intensity — all facts that challenge the alarmism. In the wake
of Gore’s film, media and activists have worked overtime to amplify every
weather event as “unprecedented,” but the evidence shows that humanity is safer
than ever from climate disasters. Climate change is real, but its impacts on
extreme weather are dramatically overstated.
***
Now consider the policy fallout. Gore’s call to action
spurred trillions of dollars in spending to reduce emissions. Yet global
fossil-fuel emissions have set records nearly every year since 2006, and they
again set a record in 2025. Fossil fuels still dominate because countries want
cheap and reliable power.
In 2006, the world got 82.6 percent of its total energy
(not just electricity) from fossil fuels, according to the International Energy
Agency. Annual fossil-fuel consumption rose 26 percent between then and 2023,
the last year with global data. Even though renewables had also grown
spectacularly, the world was still overwhelmingly dependent on fossil fuels
delivering 81.1 percent of global energy. On current trends, it will take until
the year 2708 to reach zero.
Gore explicitly claimed that the solutions to climate
change were already at hand — especially solar and wind. Implementing these
technologies swiftly and decisively, he said, required only sufficient
political will from especially rich nations. This missed the fact that solar
and wind are still not cheap and that much of the non-rich world has leaned
even more into fossil fuels.
Although solar and wind technologies have become
dramatically cheaper in recent years, they remain fundamentally intermittent:
They generate power only when the sun shines or the wind blows, not satisfying
demand around the clock. Modern societies require reliable, 24/7 electricity,
which means any heavy reliance on renewables necessitates substantial backup
systems — typically fossil-fuel plants (like natural gas) that can ramp up
quickly to fill the gaps during extended periods of low generation. People think
that batteries can play a large role, but almost everywhere, we have battery
backup for just tens of minutes, whereas weeks or months would be needed —
which would entail a prohibitive cost.
The result is that citizens and economies end up paying
nearly twice. While we save on fossil-fuel costs, we have to pay once for the
renewables themselves (including their installation, grid integration, and
subsidies) and again for the reliable backup infrastructure that will keep the
lights on.
 |
| (International Energy Agency, Statista) |
Studies examining real-world grids in places such as
China, Germany, and Texas show that, after properly accounting for these backup
costs, the true all-in price of solar and wind power often turns out to be
significantly higher than claimed — sometimes twice as expensive as coal, and
many times more than fossil fuels when reliability is factored in.
We’re constantly bombarded with the narrative that solar
and wind are the cheapest energy sources around — an idea that Gore did much to
sell. But look at the real-world data: As nations ramp up their share of these
intermittent renewables, electricity prices soar. Countries such as Denmark and
Germany, for instance, get more than 40 percent of their power from solar and
wind, but they face electricity costs double or triple those in China or the
U.S., which use these renewables far less.
And it turns out that even China, which is often rumored
to be going green, is really overwhelmingly fossil-fuel-based. The solar panels
and wind turbines China sells the rest of the world are mostly made with fossil
fuels.
An Inconvenient Truth’s naïve framing — that we
already possess affordable, scalable solutions and merely lack the resolve to
deploy them — ignored these practical engineering and economic realities.
Estimates vary, but climate policies since 2006 have cost
more than $16 trillion globally, including subsidies, regulations, and
infrastructure. In the U.S. alone, the Inflation Reduction Act poured hundreds
of billions into green tech. Yet emissions climb because the rich world’s
efforts ignore the developing world’s realities. Here’s the crux: An
Inconvenient Truth focused on what rich countries should do: cut emissions
drastically. But rich nations (OECD countries) will account for only about 13
percent of remaining 21st-century emissions. Emerging giants including China,
India, and Africa drive the rest. Even if all rich countries achieved net-zero
by mid-century, it would avert less than 0.2 degrees Fahrenheit of warming by
2100, using the U.N. climate panel’s own model. That’s negligible.
This missing sense of proportion from Al Gore continues
to stoke climate agitation, with activists happily glueing themselves to roads
and vandalizing paintings in the U.S. and Europe, blaming Western countries for
not reducing their carbon footprint enough. Meanwhile, the agitators ignore the
real elephants in the room.
As other global challenges — poverty, disease, education
— demand attention, the costs of climate policy must be weighed. The best
economic evidence suggests that unmitigated warming might shave 2–3 percent off
global GDP by 2100. That’s not trivial, but context matters: Under baseline
growth, the average person’s income globally would rise 450 percent by this
century’s end; taking into account the impact of climate change, it would feel
as if that person would be “only” 435 percent richer. We’re talking about being
vastly richer, just slightly less so.
Current net-zero policies, however, are fantastically
expensive with minimal benefits. One set of analyses pegs global net-zero costs
at $27 trillion annually across the 21st century, yielding just $4.5 trillion
in annual avoided damages. That means for every dollar spent on today’s climate
policies, we waste over 80 cents.
***
Where Gore’s movie failed most was in neglecting to make
the case for smarter approaches. Instead of panic-driven mandates, we need to
prioritize innovation. R&D into green tech — better batteries, advanced
nuclear, carbon capture — could slash costs, making a transition affordable or
even desirable for all. Adaptation saves lives cheaply: seawalls,
drought-resistant crops, early warnings. And finally, development lifts
billions out of poverty, building resilience.
If we’re actually going to tackle climate change, we will
need to pivot from Gore’s alarmist playbook to evidence-based strategies that
deliver results. Central to this is ramping up innovation through green
research and development. History shows that humanity solves big problems not
by rationing or banning but by inventing breakthroughs. We didn’t end air
pollution by banning cars; we innovated the catalytic converter. Hunger wasn’t
curbed by telling people to eat less; it was the Green Revolution — developing
and spreading high-yield crop varieties alongside modern inputs like synthetic
fertilizers, irrigation, and improved farming techniques — that dramatically
boosted harvests and helped feed billions.
But governments have neglected climate R&D for
decades. In the 1980s, rich countries spent nearly 8 cents per $100 of GDP on
low-carbon tech. Today, it’s less than 4 cents. Nations promised to double this
in 2015 but fell far short. Economists, including Nobel laureates, estimate
that boosting global green R&D to $100 billion annually — still far less
than the $2.3 trillion spent on green energy last year — could make future
decarbonization cheap enough for everyone, including the developing world. This
would accelerate advancements in fission, fusion, advanced geothermal, and
efficient storage, outpacing the costly rollout of current, inefficient
renewables.
Adaptation must complement innovation, as it’s often the
most cost-effective way to build resilience and save lives and livelihoods.
We’re already adapting successfully, which is why wildfire deaths are down;
flood deaths have likewise plummeted with adaptation and warnings. In low-lying
nations such as Bangladesh, cyclone mortality has fallen sharply with shelters
and better forecasts: from the global record death toll of more than 300,000 in
1970 to fewer than 200 dead per year since 2008. Investing in resilient
infrastructure — such as the Netherlands’ seawalls, which protect against rises
far beyond current projections, or adaptations like drought-resistant seeds —
could avert damages at a fraction of mitigation costs. Adaptation gets just a
fraction of climate funding, overshadowed by a drive for cuts in emissions that
yield tiny temperature benefits.
Finally, we need to prioritize development to build
inherent resilience. Poverty is the real killer in disasters: A hurricane
hitting rich Florida causes economic damage but few deaths, while the same
hurricane hitting poor Haiti will kill hundreds and devastate the economy.
Lifting billions out of poverty through education,
health, and economic growth creates societies that can withstand warming. Much
more important, such advances also create huge humanitarian and quality-of-life
benefits. In Africa and Asia, where emissions will surge, affordable energy
fuels this progress; forcing expensive green energy will stall progress. Gore’s
vision ignored all these factors; 20 years later, it’s time to embrace them.
Climate policy must ultimately serve people, especially
the billions facing poverty, hunger, and preventable disease. Green policies
can help a tiny bit, though they come at a huge cost, but the greatest threats
to human welfare remain those immediate killers. We should allocate our limited
resources in proportion to how effectively they can mitigate suffering —
tackling malaria, malnutrition, and lack of access to basic energy first, while
advancing clean innovations that make reliable power affordable for everyone.
This shift in focus, particularly in the world’s poorest places, will create
far more resilient societies than rigid emissions targets alone ever could.
Two decades on, An Inconvenient Truth reminds us
that claiming to care about the planet and future generations is not enough.
Alarmism has cost trillions but achieved little. We need to embrace the
evidence: Climate change is a challenge, not a catastrophe. And there are
cost-effective solutions such as innovation, adaptation, and development, even
if they are not as morally satisfying as the exhortations in Gore’s movie.
