GlobalWarming.org

Green taxes are being used by the government to raise revenues, rather than tackle climate change; are bad news for consumers and are socially unjust. These are the conclusions of the Taxpayers Alliance (TPA), a right wing lobby group dedicated to a low-tax society.

There is no shortage of ways to reduce our carbon footprint. I could teach my economics courses in the dark, forbid anyone to bring in a bottle of water, scale down the heat in winter and have everyone wear coats (and turn off the air conditioning on hot, muggy May days), force my 150 students to share one copy of the text to save trees, give only oral examinations to cut down on the use of paper, not answer e-mail from my students to minimize the electrical drain, be more like the French (or some of my colleagues) and not shower daily nor put on clean underwear. But I like to think of economics, and teaching my courses, in terms of tradeoffs—convenience, practicalities, comfort, being "fuelish"—and the marginal costs versus marginal benefits and reasonable alternative, as opposed to simply minimizing the energy bill.

Governments need to scrap subsidies for biofuels, as the current rush to support alternative energy sources will lead to surging food prices and the potential destruction of natural habitats, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development will warn on Tuesday.

Australia's flagship scheme to cut greenhouse gas pollution is on the verge of collapse, putting jobs and millions of green investment dollars at risk and killing the incentive for householders to cut soaring electricity consumption.

Every time NASA's James Hansen makes a global warming pronouncement, the press treats his words as if they were gospel. When he announced that 1998 was the warmest year on record, it was front page news. The only problem is NASA's "facts" were wrong.

After looking at one too many projections of global-warming disasters — computer graphics of coasts swamped by rising seas, mounting death tolls from heat waves — I was ready for a reality check. Instead of imagining a warmer planet, I traveled to a place that has already felt the heat, accompanied by Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish political scientist and scourge of environmentalist orthodoxy.