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The United Nations is at a crossroads.
President Trump pulled out of the World Health Organization, cut funding for the UN’s Climate Convention, and more withdrawals are likely in the pipeline.
He calls the UN an “underperformer,” suggesting it is a swamp to be drained.
At this critical juncture, one could reasonably assume the UN would justify its existence by sharpening its focus on peace and prosperity through sound, data-based advice.
Instead, it is boldly working to suppress open debate on climate change while pushing prosperity-wrecking policies.
The UN has partnered with the government of Brazil to launch a global initiative ominously called the “Global Initiative for Information Integrity on Climate Change,” which will promote the publication of “verified” climate change information by media outlets and on social media.
The UN bluntly states that its objective is to “boost support for urgent climate action” — revealing that the goal is not to highlight the broad scientific consensus that climate change is real, but to boost just one allowable policy response.
As UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has made clear, “urgent climate action” means a race to net-zero, extremist, economy-punishing policies, including rich countries paying poor countries huge sums for climate reparations, sweeping new climate taxes and ending fossil fuels entirely within 25 years.
In determining what policy response you must choose, the unelected UN is engaging in pure propaganda.
Imagine if it were to regulate the migration debate and would only allow statements that supported an extreme policy of completely open (or closed) borders everywhere.
The UN is ignoring the inconvenient truth that there are many important, ongoing debates among climate scientists and economists.
Even after decades of extensive research, huge uncertainty remains on how much the world would warm from a doubling of CO2.
Research from climate economists also shows that most current climate policies are vastly inefficient.
The UN would dismiss policy discussion — and even facts — in the name of promoting a singular response to climate change.
We know this, because the UN initiative’s early work setting out its supposed “facts on climate” already shows its unabashed bias.
One such “fact” the UN is promoting: that sea level rise could submerge small islands like Kiribati.
This claim is often repeated by progressive media outlets, yet ignores a vast scientific literature showing that almost every atoll including Kiribati is stable or increasing in size — evidence acknowledged even by The New York Times.
Among the whoppers
Another UN “fact” is that climate change is a major threat to human health because fossil fuel-caused air pollution causes some 8.7 million deaths a year.
Not only is this figure more than twice what the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates, but the UN deliberately confuses climate policy (which cuts CO2) with the real solution, which is cutting air pollution through scrubbers on smokestacks and catalytic converters on cars.
In misstating the threat to life, the UN ignores the fact that deaths from climate-related catastrophes have declined 97.5% over the past century — or that far more people die from cold than heat.
The UN also repeats the oft-told lie that renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels.
They gloss over this mistruth by measuring the cost only when the sun is shining or the wind blowing, ignoring the costs of intermittency and unreliability.
The fact is, no country with significant solar and wind has low electricity costs — indeed, on average, electricity costs are two or three times higher than for countries with little solar and wind.
Among the UN’s other supposed facts is that “solar panels and wind turbines make good use of land” (in reality, solar and wind are some of the most land-intensive energy forms) and that the transition to clean energy will create millions of jobs.
The latter is an economically illiterate mistruth: In the US, solar employs 35 workers to produce the same amount of energy that one natural gas worker can produce, meaning natural gas is much more efficient because 34 workers can be freed to do other important work, increasing social welfare.
Predetermined narrative
All these lies speak to the bigger problem: The UN will only “verify” the claims and narratives — whether true or not — that “boost support for urgent climate action.”
The UN will not “verify” the fact that the most recent research on the costs and benefits of net-zero climate policies shows average annual benefits of $4.5 trillion over the 21st century and much larger costs of $27 trillion per year.
Indeed, in the UN’s Orwellian world, this fact would likely be deemed “disinformation.”
The United Nations is trying to control what people can hear, read and think about climate change just when social media companies like Meta are reversing their years-long policy of “fact-checking,” climate change policy debate—which Meta admits resulted in censorship.
The proposal that taxpayers spend hundreds of trillions of dollars on poor climate policies is surely worth debate.
The UN has no place suppressing that discussion.
If it is to survive, the UN and other multilateral organizations need to return to their roots of helping humanity to navigate the world for peace and prosperity.
And they must learn that free and informed debate poses no threat to that cause.
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.”