World Economic Forum Elites Should Focus on Economics, Not Climate Change or Climate News
By Linnea Lueken
A recent article at Climate Change News discussing this week’s 2026 World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Davos, Switzerland worries that climate change is no longer a high priority for the attending global elites, while also attempting to reassure readers that the topic hasn’t disappeared entirely. It is true that climate change is dropping on the list of elites’ concerns, but it is not a bad thing. The attendees’ concerns are still wildly out of step with the concerns of average people who are impacted the most by the policies discussed and pushed at Davos.
The article, titled “Ahead of Davos, climate drops down global elite’s list of pressing concerns,” was written before the Davos event kicked off Monday, January 19, and focuses on a survey conducted by the WEF’s Global Risks Perception Survey of “experts” and leaders in advance of the meeting. This year, the survey found that for the first time in years, “climate change, pollution, and biodiversity loss have dropped down an international ranking of short-term concerns for high-profile business leaders, academics, and politicians,” as priorities shifted towards more concern over “economic risks like geoeconomic confrontation, economic downturn, inflation, and asset bubbles bursting.” (See the graph, below, from the WEF).
Considering the organization is the World Economic Forum, this shift should never have been necessary in the first place, as economic troubles should have always remained a top priority for these elites. Economics are consistently a concern for everyday people, whereas climate change ranks very low.
Polling in the United States and Europe show that climate policies that would impact economic opportunity, like carbon taxes, banning combustion engine vehicles, among others, are broadly unpopular, and that other concerns rank higher.
Ipsos, a market research company the WEF frequently uses, reports in their annual “What Worries the World?” survey that climate change barely makes the top 10 issues most people in the world are concerned about. (see the graph, below)
Crime and violence is number one, and even immigration ranks above climate change. By contrast, neither of those issues, nor others average folks said they were more concerned about than climate change, made the top 10 concerns in the Davos survey, unless you count the nebulous “social polarization” category:
In surveys specifically about environmental issues, pollution is one of the top environmental concerns for the average person, yet it ranks lowest for Davos attendees, while climate related issues are the elites’ top concern, an exact reversal of the common man’s priorities.
The director of the climate alarmist Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Johan Rockström, assured readers that “priorities shift but it doesn’t mean that they’re not interconnected,” and that “to reduce inequality also means providing energy in the cheapest way possible – and that’s with renewables.”
This is false, but a common claim from renewables peddlers and climate alarmists. If renewables like wind and solar are cheap, they would not need to be propped up by government subsidies and special aid from global banks. In addition, if they were so cheap, energy prices in places that have invested in renewables the heaviest would not be higher, and rising faster, than in states and countries that still rely primarily on traditional sources of electric power, like coal, hydropower, natural gas, and nuclear. Rockström may be talking about biomass, which is often classified as a renewable, but burning wood and animal dung for cooking fuel and energy is not a positive in most of the world.
In fact, data show that fossil fuels are the most affordable energy sources even with government subsidies giving wind and solar a leg up. Cheapest of all is natural gas, and these resources are also the most reliable, able to work in conditions where wind and solar fail.
This article and the poll underlying it reinforces the fact that global elites really are disconnected from the concerns of the rest of us, and reality. Scientific data show that climate change is not an existential threat, not to humanity and not to the planet, which even fellow-elite Bill Gates recently affirmed.
Climate Change News and the WEF should get with the program and realize that their concerns do not reflect the needs of the people they are supposed to represent. These business leaders and politicians have an outsized power over the rest of us, and it is worrying that their priorities have long been and remain so out of step with the needs and priorities of the vast bulk of the human population.
“A recent article at Climate Change News discussing this week’s 2026 World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Davos, Switzerland worries that climate change is no longer a high priority for the attending global elites, while also attempting to reassure readers that the topic hasn’t disappeared entirely. It is true that climate change is dropping on the list of elites’ concerns, but it is not a bad thing. The attendees’ concerns are still wildly out of step with the concerns of average people who are impacted the most by the policies discussed and pushed at Davos.”
This was also the opening para of the post just 16 hours ago, as was much of the text, and the concluding para. Word for word. Who is writing this stuff?
Unusually, I agree with you as thought I was having that deja vu, again, on reading the same thing twice.
🙂
The weather wouldn’t bow to the nonsensical climate crisis and with each passing year the ‘theory’ looks even more ludicrous.
Never mind.
“climate crisis”, “climate change”,…
What is really meant by this is the highly uncertain anthropogenic contribution to global warming.
The first point in a scientific discussion should be to properly define the topic of the discussion.
And for this particular topic the progress (or rather the lack thereof) over the last decades measured by the uncertainty is noteworthy!
The last two generations of climate models have incompatible results about the CO2-sensitivity in their high feedback versions! That is nothing short of a scientific disaster!
I am surprised you noticed. Funny you don’t pick WA labor government lies published in PR fluff pieces even when you are given the facts. Must be those green colored glasses you wear, hey 🙂
The truth can never be repeated too often.
If the Europeans truly cared about energy, they would be all in for fracking in the short term, and nuclear long term.
Obviously, they are doing neither. Sucking up to greens is a higher priority, especially
in Germany and the UK.
If the Europeans truly cared about energy, they would build far more renewable energy, invest in local production chains and expand and modernize their electricity grid
That’s what the Europeans (and the British) did. They spent massive amounts of money (1 trillion € just in Germany) in renewables and subsidies for local production chain. There were dozens of new manufacturers of PV-cells and windgenerators popping up, like mushrooms after rain.
But it dosn’t work, because cheap energy is the master ressource of economy and exactly this cheap energy is annihilated with the inefficient renewables and ever more taxing of fossile fuels. When the massive flow of subsidies had to be cut back, the collapse of this Green industry started. China dumped them out of the market, with cheap PV-cells and windmills produced with cheap energy from mostly coal power plants.
The exploding energy prices are now also wrecking their “old” industry (cars, chemicals, steel, machinery).
Yet they’re blaming their collapsing industries on not enough green energy.
All Industry relies on raw material, energy, labor and transportation.
The cheaper, the better.
Anything done deliberately to raise the cost of industry higher than competing industry is THE recipe for failure.
And raw material and transportation are also highly influenced by energy. Mining and processing raw materials is mostly very energy intensive and transportation is literally driven by energy.
So if you deliberately increase the cost of energy, you also boost the cost of raw materials and transportation.
That’s why I said: energy is the master ressoruce.
Was that a cris de coeur?
If the Europeans really cared about energy, they would drop Ruinables like Wind and Solar immediately, and return to oil, fracked gas, and nuclear.
It would be very funny, if it were not tragic, how the progressive left talks about ‘modernizing the electricity grid’.
What they in fact mean by this is building huge new capacity from nowhere to the South East. Nowwhere being off the north or north east coast of Scotland. The only reason this is needed is for the wind farms. If you were modernizing the existing grid the north coast of Scotland is about the last thing you would be focusing on. You might be replacing end of life gas plants, you might be replacing end of life transformers (of the kind that took down Heathrow airport recently when it blew up).
But no, you are building expensive transmission solely to get intermittent power from the place you have decided to install it, despite there being a total lack of demand there.
Just do the sensible thing. Modernize the grid you have – make it more robust and increase capacity between useful generation points and demand. And stop building generating capacity where its not needed, then building these highways to nowhere to try and get your useless intermittent power to the place where there is demand,
Its almost as if the UK political establishment was doing its level best to destroy and make unaffordable UK electricity supply.
Meanwhile the Telegraph has a puff piece about some guy installing batteries for a few thousand pounds. 10kwh worth. To load up in off peak and then release in peak period – arbitrage in short. How much use is this 10kwh going to be during the coming week long blackouts? Cooking? Running the gas boiler and radiators? Making tea? Boiling water for hot water bottles? Watching the disaster unfold on live TV?
Except then there would be no electricity on windless nights..
That would be pretty DUMB, wouldn’t it.
Just the sort of thing someone who’s mind is in La-La-Land would suggest.
btw, any production chain requires reliable, stable, synchronised electricity…
… something that wind and solar just can never supply
right just ask Spain
Sure why would Europe shoot the other foot when they can blow the whole leg off. You forgot the /sarc tag clearly.
Ukraine has large reserves of COAL, could supply Europe for a long time..
Reliable, Cheap, and Clean.
All of which fit the description of
”sucking up to the greens”.
Nothing like being totally deluded, this accompanied with unbelievable ignorance . . but let’s see – once again! – if we can provide some help:
Notwithstanding intermittency, unreliability, asynchronisity, a complete lack of inertia, fantastic expense, pathetic efficiency, and non-dispatchability, what will actually stop this wind/solar nonsense in its tracks is the limits of mining and metals supply.
Copper, for example:
Annual global copper production is ~25million tonnes per annum (Mtpa).
And global copper Reserves are 880 million tonnes (Mt).
But to build the wind turbines, the solar panels, the batteries for EVs and for 28 days of power storage for when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine, plus increase grid sizes by 3-fold, 6 BILLION tonnes of copper will have to be produced between now and 2050.
Even if the Reserves were there, which they’re not, at current rates of production . . . it would take 240 years to produce that amount of metal.
Or, IF it was possible to increase global copper production overnight by tomorrow morning from 25Mtpa to 240Mtpa, in order to produce 6 BILLION tonnes of copper by 2050 – IT ISN’T!! – global copper Reserves would be depleted in under four years.
Nickel is worse. Current global nickel production is 2.35Mtpa, Reserves are 95Mt, and 1.25 BILLION tonnes are required to be produced by 2050 . . . which would take 530 years at current rates of production IF the Reserves were there!!
“Just build more mines,” an ignorant and idiotic politician would instantly and stupidly say, no doubt echoed by MyUsernameReloaded.
The thing is, from Resource (mineralised deposit) discovery – which takes years of painstaking geological exploration work in itself – to operating producing mine . . . is a 15 year exercise AT BEST.
In a word, it ain’t going to happen, and the sooner you and our ignorant and idiotic politicians wake up to this FACT, the better.
And then we need another plan . . . which will exclude the total and utter nonsense and profligacy that is wind and solar.
Trump told the Movers and Shakers at Davos yesterday, that only Stupid People buy windmills.
i imagine Mad Ed Milliband and a lot of Europeans felt insulted hearing that.
Trump is right. Again.
Trump tells the truth and some people don’t like hearing the truth.
Too bad, so sad, your Daddy.
Nobody is insulted by a clown.
Mark’s speech on the other hand really got und his skin.
It’s not about insults. It’s about money. When he says that it means no subsidies for poor choices.
Corporations have plenty of capital to invest in renewables. They don’t because they can get a reasonable price to cover costs and risks. Simple as that. If these were great investments oil companies (cash cows) would be falling all over themselves to build them without subsidies. They’re not.
A whole pile of middle powers puffed and cried and in the end caved in and Trump got exactly what he wanted with Greenland. That is what most of the press and history will record.
From what I read it was TACO time and to console himself and his base he quips something about a deal that he can give no details of.
He alienated US allies for almost nothing
Art of the deal.
Your reading comprehension is at about a pre-school level.
Enlighten me.
Not worth the powder trying to educate a flame warrior.
I seem to recall that the President Fico of Slovakia told Trump he was spot on.
I, like all the brainwashed folks here in elite Wokeachusetts, used to hate Trump’s bluntness. Now I adore it. It’s long been needed.
Only in Climate Land.
local?
But that goes against the arguments that the sun is always shining somewhere and the wind is always blowing somewhere. You just need to get the energy to where it is needed. Simple.
At least that is what they are programmed to spew.
When Europe and the UK cover their nations with ruinables, they can kiss their huge tourist industry goodby. (many other industries too of course)
The World Bank’s ‘Global Photovoltaic Power Potential by Country’ ranks the UK 229th out of 230 but Mad Ed is determined to turn as much productive farmland into solar farms as he can. He wants to increase solar from the current 18GW to 47GW by 2030. He is a man on a mission – to ruining the country.
They’ve been doing this for a decade or so already. And the average person is getting hammered by price increases that follow intermittent and low density energy sources. Time for the Europeans to adjust course.
It’s numero uno for mad Ed and Lol Lol Labour.
Only we aren’t laughing, quite the reverse…
Of Course Climate Sceptics Are Winning the Media War: The Facts Don’t Lie https://dailysceptic.org/2026/01/22/of-course-climate-sceptics-are-winning-the-media-war-the-facts-dont-lie/
Climate change?? Good God that’s soooooo yesterdays and would you believe some folks are still locked in the past banging on about plastics! Do keep up concerned dooming people-
The world has entered an era of ‘global water bankruptcy’, UN warns. What does it actually mean?
Good news for Canada and Russia?
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/fresh-water-by-country
I read that article yesterday and couldn’t stop laughing. I loved that they invented this new term “water bankruptcy” to make it sound very scientific and real and they want to create an agenda. I think they didn’t get the memo the UN has a budget issue because of Trump.
So send some mining engineers to Antarctica and bring home the ice.
Melt it. Problem solved.
/s
Apparently it’s going to melt on it’s own due to climate change so we just need to dig a channel in the ice and collect it 🙂
So long as it does not mix with the ocean. Saline is not all that potable.
Story Tip
In which the madness continues….
Today in the UK Telegraph there are two stories. One is by the climate and energy advisor to the UK’s Tony Blair Institute, It explains that
Miliband’s net-zero drive is doomed if he fails to bring down bills. A successful transition must be pro-growth, pro-investment and visibly fair to households
So there is then a whole long fairy dust article which proposes various changes to market regulation, explains that subsidizing the running costs of wind and solar are not sensible investments, and argues for continuation of the net zero policy with investment only in things that will lower costs long term.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/01/22/miliband-net-zero-drive-doomed-if-fails-bring-down-bills/
The big argument in this piece is for something called zonal pricing. The concept is an illustration of the idiocy of UK energy policy at the moment. They first build lots of wind generating capacity off the coast of Scotland, They then discover to their surprise that there is no demand there, its all in the South East. OK, they then start constructing, at vast expense and over a decade or so, transmission to bring the power down to where its wanted.
This is very expensive, so to recover these costs transmission charges are levied, which (again to the general astonishment of the UK political class) leads to wind farms off the north coast of Scotland paying more to transmit their power to London than locally based gas generating plants.
So the answer, according to both Octopus Energy and the Tony Blair institute, is to charge more for electricity in the South East. A lot more. And lower the local prices in Scotland. That will fix it. Business and demand will move to Scotland, problem over.
Notice that there is no mention of the real problem. No matter how you price it, the costs of delivering power from wind and solar are just too high, way over what it would cost to generate and deliver the same power to where its needed using gas (as a for instance).
In another piece in the same issue of the Telegraph we have this:
A record 10 terawatt hours (TWh) of wind power went to waste in 2025, according to a report from energy analyst Montel – costing billpayers a total of £1.4bn in “curtailment costs”.
This was up 22pc on the year before, as growing strain on the grid prevented wind power from being transported to the cities and towns that need it most.
This results in so-called curtailment costs, which are paid to wind farms when they are asked to switch off.
At the same time, grid operators must call on gas plants to step in and keep the lights on with replacement power, often at great expense.
Analysts said that wind farms in Scotland were largely to blame.
Montel’s report said: “The amount of renewable electricity curtailed in Great Britain in 2025 (10TWh) could have met the combined electricity demand of every domestic household in London for the entire year.
“Northern Scotland has seen the most curtailment by far. Over 8.8TWh of wind power in northern Scotland was switched off, enough to also power all Scottish domestic electricity demand for the year.”
Yes, its all the fault of those wind farms in Scotland. And the biggest constraint payments of all are apparently in Northern Ireland. Who would have thought that Northern Ireland, with its huge population and that hot bed of heavy industry, AI and finance, would not have had a use for all that wind power we are sending to it? Obviously the answer is reduce prices in Northern Ireland and the world will move there immediately and take advantage of all that cheap power!
And meanwhile, guess what we have in Tamino? Yes, you guessed it, its the Hockey Stick again!
https://tamino.wordpress.com/2026/01/15/global-temperature-update-7/
Lets stop climate change because kids lives matter, says Tamino. Right, Lets do it by building some wind farms in Scotland, then paying the operators to turn them off, then pay other operators in the South East to turn on gas to provide the power people need where they actually need it.
All makes perfecf sense. Saving the planet and lowering costs and increasing energy security. That is, if you are living in the bubble of right thinking progressives, always wrong but never in doubt, going through more and more intellectual contortions and idiotic proposals to escape the forseeable consequences of the first set of idiotic proposals that landed us all in the present mess.
Lets stop climate change
Right up there with lets end gravity it’s such a pull factor…
Gravity sucks 🙂
Vacuums suck.
Gravity makes you heavy.
It’s a downer.
twu dat
All this talk about an energy transition is wasted because we haven’t allowed ourselves the luxury of an honest discussion on the reality or otherwise of dangerous climate change, and whether we humans have actually caused any change beyond natural variability that is well documented historically and defined over hundreds of millions of years from recent scientific endeavor by experts.
Yes, we are committing economic and social `hari kari’ over a speculative climate threat, that will likely never happen. How does our vaunted academia and precious progressive politics, allow this total nonsense to dominate our thinking, when there are real geopolitical problems like authoritarian Russia, Iran and China out there trying really hard to wreck our cozy western democratic civilization. Wake up people and smell the manure you are shoveling!
We are dealing with massive climate phobia.
Think of what the billionaires got for heir climate myopia. Manufacturing and industrial production in developed countries with expensive labor and tight pollution controls became uncompetitive and move to developing countries in Asia with cheap labor, loose pollution controls and cheap energy. Lower manufacturing cost allowed higher profits without raising prices leading to low inflation and low interest rates. Billionaires who use money to make money, like nothing better than cheap money. Blue collar workers saw jobs lost, hours reduced and downward pressure on wages. While the corporations they worked for made more money, they lost IP, trained their offshore suppliers in manufacturing and design so the suppliers became competitors.
Now that A.I. is the big new thing for investors, intellectual property is highly valuable and you can’t export the work to countries who don’t respect IP laws, hence the need to keep the work at home. That’s work is energy intensive and relies on low cost dispatchable energy.
When you think how this will play out, well healed investors used climate alarm to put blue collar workers out of work and now will use climate pragmatism and A.I. to put white collar workers out of work.
Private enterprise will go along with any price signals and slushfunding dumbass watermelons want to provide and virtue signal right along with them. Hey they’ll even do the PR thing with the high vis and helmet handshakes all round and the signing of their carefully prepared contracts.
You will have nothing and you will be happy.
How many of the delegates used CO2 free transportation, housing, food, etc., to attend?
Hypocrits.
Davos/WEF etc. only care about what could bring about One World Government and CC has lost favor with them because it is losing the world’s interest and can no longer be used as their tool to bring it about.
Trump upset the one world government unless it is a USA controlled government and that is what upset them. They tried to talk around it but the main issue that it was playing to China stung and they could not shake and was the message the press took away. You can choose almost any world press but this is what they saw
https://www.news.com.au/technology/environment/climate-change/subservient-to-china-net-zero-warning-at-davos-as-trump-slams-the-policy-chinese-vicepremier-defends-renewables/news-story/715a15a2cde6f35f65b4c2f234d7d11a
Probably the most telling comments was from Zelenskyy who was probably shaken by how weak the EU really is and as he was relying on them to be strong.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/22/zelenskyy-accuses-eu-leaders-waiting-direction-donald-trump-greenland
I laughed because he said what a lot of us had been saying about the Greenland fiasco
Zelenskyy said: “Sending 14 or 40 soldiers to Greenland – what is that meant to achieve? What message does that send to Putin? To China?
Climate continues to rank low as a priority of the average person. High on this list is the impact decisions made by global elites have had on the average person.
After the U.S. capture of Nicolás Maduro in early January 2026, Venezuela has been receiving a lot of press the last few weeks. Of particular interest is that more than 90 percent of the 30 million Venezuelans live in poverty. Nearly 70 percent are stuck in extreme poverty.
The wealthier nations setting net-zero emissions policies avoid reality that 80% of the 8 billion on planet Earth are living on less than $10/day. Shockingly, Venezuelans represent only 5% of the more than 6 billion on this planet living in poverty!
“Net-zero” is NOT affordable by the 6 billion living in poverty!
Climate Change don’t get no respect. No respect at all, I tell you.
Climate change hasn’t “dropped in importance” to the average person. Grifters stealing our money is just as important as ever.
The only ideas the World Economic Forum holds that are more irrational and destructive to society than their views on weather and climate are their views on economics….