UN Promotes Controversial Green Deal Policies Amidst Environmental Misinformation

The United Nations stands at a pivotal moment.

President Trump withdrew from the World Health Organization, reduced funding for the UN’s Climate Convention, and further exits may be on the horizon.

He labels the UN as an “underperformer,” indicating it is a swamp that needs draining.

At such a crucial time, one might expect the UN to validate its role by intensifying its commitment to promoting peace and prosperity through solid, data-driven guidance.

Instead, it audaciously seeks to stifle open discussions on climate change, all the while advocating policies detrimental to prosperity.

The UN has aligned with the Brazilian government to initiate a global program ominously named the “Global Initiative for Information Integrity on Climate Change,” which aims to encourage the dissemination of “verified” climate change information via media outlets and social media platforms.

The UN explicitly states its goal is to “enhance support for urgent climate action”—highlighting that the aim is not to underscore the wide scientific agreement that climate change is real but to promote a singular acceptable policy response.

As UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has emphasized, “urgent climate action” equates to aggressive, economy-inhibiting measures, such as affluent nations compensating poorer nations with substantial sums for climate reparations, imposing sweeping new climate taxes, and entirely phasing out fossil fuels within a quarter-century.

In determining the policy route one must adopt, the unelected UN is indulging in blatant propaganda.

Imagine if it were to oversee the migration debate and permitted statements that only supported either extreme open or closed borders everywhere.

The UN disregards the uncomfortable reality that substantive discussions continue among climate scientists and economists.

Even after many years of extensive study, significant uncertainties persist regarding the extent of global warming resulting from a doubling of CO2 concentrations.

Research by climate economists indicates that many existing climate policies are exceedingly inefficient.

In the pursuit of a singular response to climate change, the UN aspires to dismiss policy deliberations—and even established facts.

This bias is evident, as the early outputs of the UN initiative, which outlines its claimed “facts on climate,” reflect its undeniable partiality.

One of the “facts” the UN promotes is that rising sea levels could submerge small islands like Kiribati.

This assertion, frequently echoed by progressive media, neglects an extensive body of scientific literature demonstrating that nearly all atolls, including Kiribati, are stable or increasing in size—an observation recognized even by The New York Times.

Some glaring inaccuracies

Another UN “fact” claims that climate change poses a significant threat to human health due to fossil fuel-related air pollution responsible for approximately 8.7 million deaths annually.

This figure not only exceeds the World Health Organization’s (WHO) estimates by more than double but also conflates climate policy (which reduces CO2) with the actual remedy, which lies in reducing air pollution through smokestack scrubbers and catalytic converters on vehicles.

By misrepresenting the threat to human life, the UN overlooks the reality that deaths from climate-related disasters have dropped by 97.5% over the last century, and that far more individuals perish from cold-related conditions than from heat.

The UN also perpetuates the well-known falsehood that renewable energy sources are cheaper than fossil fuels.

They obscure this inaccuracy by evaluating costs only during sunny or windy periods, disregarding the expenses associated with intermittency and unreliability.

The reality is that no nation with substantial solar and wind energy has low electricity costs—in fact, on average, electricity expenses are two or three times greater than those of countries with minimal solar and wind reliance.

Among the other dubious claims made by the UN is the notion that “solar panels and wind turbines utilize land effectively” (when, in truth, solar and wind are among the most land-intensive energy sources) and that the shift to clean energy will generate millions of jobs.

This assertion reflects a significant economic misunderstanding: In the U.S., solar requires 35 workers to produce the same energy that one natural gas worker can deliver, illustrating that natural gas is substantially more efficient, freeing up 34 workers for other essential tasks and enhancing social welfare.

A skewed narrative

All these inaccuracies highlight a larger issue: The UN will only “verify” those claims and narratives—whether true or false—that “enhance support for urgent climate action.”

The UN will not “verify” the fact that the latest research on the costs and benefits of net-zero climate policies reveals average annual benefits of $4.5 trillion throughout the 21st century, juxtaposed against escalating costs of $27 trillion per year.

Indeed, in the UN’s Orwellian context, this fact would likely be categorized as “disinformation.”

The United Nations is attempting to regulate what information people can access, read, and contemplate regarding climate change, precisely as social media companies such as Meta are reversing their longstanding policies of “fact-checking” debates on climate change, which Meta acknowledges has led to censorship.

The discussion around taxpayer expenditures of hundreds of trillions of dollars for subpar climate policies is undoubtedly worthy of debate.

The UN should refrain from quelling that conversation.

To endure, the UN and other multilateral organizations must revert to their foundational mission of guiding humanity toward peace and prosperity.

They must comprehend that fostering a free and informed debate poses no threat to that mission.

Bjorn Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus, Visiting Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and author of “False Alarm” and “Best Things First.”