All the resources going into chasing “net zero” policies across the West are wasted in more ways than one.

The obvious one is that it all involves lots of pain for very little real gain when it comes to slowing climate change, since China, India and the developing world aren’t on board.

Worse, the passion distracts from the need to face actually looming environmental threats now confronting humanity. 

Like overfishing.

That’s a genuine, short-term problem, one that could bring with it imminent catastrophe by disrupting marine food chains. 

It has nothing — literally zero — to do with carbon emissions. 

It can be solved by implementing policies that encourage fish farming and punish excessive drag fishing. 

Not by forcing us all to use LED bulbs and eat mealworms. 

Then there’s food waste. 

By some analyses, as much as one-third of all food intended for humans now goes to waste. 

That’s another massive environmental crisis, one that has nothing to do with carbon.

Its solutions lie with smart local network efforts and business innovation. 

Or consider the insect collapse. 

Global insect populations are dropping by as much as 2.5% a year. 

No serious green thinker blames that on warming, and the risks it poses — mass plant death and subsequent planetary starvation — are far greater. 

Green maniacs are actually causing terrible environmental problems, too. 

Like with solar, one of the chief renewables pushed by climate fanatics.  

Turns out that the waste generated by the production of solar panels — which is 300 times as toxic as nuclear waste, and which is usually shipped from the rich countries that buy the panels to desperately poor ones — poses major health risks, all while solar does almost nothing to combat emissions. 

And that’s to say nothing of green efforts to close down nuclear plants, forcing coal plants to come back online (at least 20 are being resurrected in Germany alone). 

Look: Climate change is a risk, but it’s a long-term, moderate one. 

Per the United Nations, as Bjorn Lomborg has noted, the cost of climate change by the 2070s will be equivalent to a per capita .2% to 2% loss of income. 

In other words, a moderate recession (albeit taking place in a much richer world). 

That’s a legitimate, concerning risk. 

But combating it doesn’t justify the wholesale reorganization of society, or keeping poor nations poor by denying them cheap energy. 

Pushing to move from coal to LNG in developing nations and to build out nuclear capacity in developed ones would be a good start for those actually concerned. 

But for greens, that’s a huge no-no.

So their focus on carbon emissions is not only causing the policies they advocate to miss real and immediate threats. 

It’s making us all much worse off.