Our current climate conversation embodies two blatantly contradictory claims. On one side, experts warn that promised climate policies will be economically crippling.
In a new report, the International Energy Agency (IEA) states that achieving net-zero in 2050 will likely be “the greatest challenge humankind has ever faced.”
That is a high bar, surpassing the Second World War, the black plague, and COVID.
On the other side, hand-waving politicians sell net-zero climate schemes as a near-utopia that every nation will rush to embrace.
As U.S. climate envoy John Kerry told world leaders gathered at President Biden’s climate summit in April: “No one is being asked for a sacrifice.”
Both claims can’t be true. Yet, they are often espoused by the same climate campaigners in different parts of their publicity cycle.
The tough talk aims to shake us into action, and the promise of rainbows hides the political peril when the bills come due.
George Orwell called this willingness to espouse contradictory claims doublethink. It is politically expedient and gets climate-alarmed politicians reelected. But if we want to fix climate change, we need honesty.
Currently promised climate policies will be incredibly expensive. While they will deliver some benefits, their costs will be much higher.
Yes, climate change is real and man-made, and we should be smart in fixing it. But we don’t because climate impacts are often vastly exaggerated, leaving us panicked.
The UN Climate Panel estimates that if we do nothing, climate damages in 2100 will be equivalent to 2.6 percent of global GDP. That is a problem but not the end of the world.
Because climate news only reports the worst outcomes most people think the damage will be much greater. Remember how we were repeatedly told 2020’s Atlantic hurricane season was the worst ever?
The reporting ignored that almost everywhere else, hurricane intensity was feeble, making 2020 one of the globally weakest in satellite history. And even within the Atlantic, 2020 ranked thirteenth.
When John Kerry and many other politicians insist that climate policies mean no sacrifice, they are clearly dissembling.
In the UN Climate Panel’s overview, all climate policies have real costs. Why else would we need recurrent climate summits to arm-twist unwilling politicians to ever-greater promises?
The IEA’s new net-zero report contains plenty of concrete examples of sacrifices. By 2050, we will have to live with much lower energy consumption than today.
Despite being richer, the average global person will be allowed less energy than today’s average poor. We will all be allowed less energy than the average Albanian used in the 1980s.
We will also have to accept shivering in winter at 19°C and sweltering in summer at 26°C, lower highway speeds, and fewer people being allowed to fly.
But climate policy sacrifices could still make sense if their costs were lower than the achieved climate benefits. If we could avoid the 2.6 percent climate damage for, say, one percent sacrifice, that would be a good outcome.
This is common sense and the core logic of the world’s only climate economist to win the Nobel Prize (2018 laureate William Nordhaus of Yale). Smart climate policy costs little and reduces climate damages a lot.
Unfortunately, our current doublethink delivers the reverse outcome. One new peer-reviewed study finds the cost of net-zero just after 2060 — much later than most politicians promise — will cost us more than four percent of GDP by 2040, or about $5 trillion annually.
And this assumes globally coordinated carbon taxes. Otherwise, costs will more than double. Paying eight percent or more to avoid part of 2.6 percent damages half a century later is just bad economics.
It is also implausible politics. Just for China, the cost of going net-zero exceeds seven to 14 percent of its GDP.
Instead, China uses green rhetoric to placate westerners but aims for development with 247 new coal-fired power plants. China now emits more greenhouse gases than the entire rich world.
Most other poorer countries are hoping to follow China’s rapid ascendance. At a recent climate conference, where dozens of high-level delegates dutifully lauded net-zero, India went off-script.
As other participants squirmed, power minister Raj Kumar Singh inconveniently blurted out the truth: net-zero “is just pie-in-the-sky.” He added that developing countries will want to use more and more fossil fuels and “you can’t stop them.”
If we push on with our climate doublethink, rich people will likely continue to wring their hands and aim for net-zero, even at considerable costs to their own societies.
But three-quarters of future emissions come from poorer countries pursuing what they regard as the more important development priorities of avoiding poverty, hunger, and disease.
Like most great challenges humanity has faced, we solve them not by pushing for endless sacrifices but through innovation. COVID is fixed with vaccines, not unending lockdowns.
Bjorn Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Consensus, is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His latest book is “False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet.”
Read rest at Financial Post
From the article, “We will all be allowed less energy than the average Albanian used in the 1980s.” What in the world does that mean? These authors should use reference points that we are familiar with. I looked it up. The energy use would be one eighth of what the average American used in 1980. That would be one seventh of our current use.
From the article, “that if we do nothing, climate damages in 2100 will be equivalent to 2.6 percent of global GDP.” These estimates are bogus. Extreme weather events are not increasing. The climate models are failing. Yet, there is no consideration to the increase crop yield caused by the carbon dioxide fertilization effect that is happening today.
Hi all,
I recently created a poster talk on this for an IoP conference, now published on Elsevier’s SSRN. The graphs have a bulleted ppt slide explanation. I will try to add a narration later. O can present it if asked, I have a script. But here it is, as is, NOW.
Consumer Alert: Contains only determinism and facts. No models were harmed in the creation of this science
“Riveting science, I watched till I stopped” Richard feynman “How dare you” Greta Thunberg.
http://ssrn.com/abstract=3864144
And here are the PPT slides that it was made from, another talk I can give on request.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/d4swfimjjsprycf/IoP%2027th%20May.pdf?dl=0
Just need someone with a commercial Zoom account I can deliver it for (Heartland, IPA?)?
If you want to use them yourself, please contact me. Brian RL Catt is not hard to find……… so far …… any disappearance will be involuntary.
POINT: This is for real scientists. Not people who believe models can be proven science. The summary slides cover the necessary bases w/o hesitation, distraction or repetition. The scientific observational evidence of the past and present provides NO evidence that real, AKA observed, climate change is unusual, hence not caused by humans.
How? The data shows change is not significantly different now from the continuous natural record of change that science has now observed in the records from the past. Assertions to the contrary by anyone in a position to inform the public of the facts are thus now deliberate lies by anyone claiming expertise or responsibility in this area, on the provable facts, accessible to all.
Models created to prove something is not as observed are wrong, disproven by observations. and cannot trump observations in a rational and technologically dependent society.
TACTS: The correlation with rising CO2 is because we are producing more while the World is also warming, very slightly and naturally, as is usual at this time in the natural observed cycle. That the very tiny temperature change from what is a tiny amount of trace gas is clearly not seen should give some indication of any sensitivity, and, if real, even the climate “science” says this is decreasing exponentially with concentration of CO2. (Band Saturation Effect)
So any correlation between the rising CO2 and global tempertaure change , which is sometimes negatively correlated and always lagging temperature in the natural record, is overtly a co-incidence during an insignificant 50 year sample of part of a short warming phase of a much longer natural cycle, e.g. change during this cycle is of the same range and rate as before, so CO2 has had an indiscernible real effect. The data says no.
NUMBERS: Global temperature has gone up and down continuously, over a 2 deg C range at a rate of c.0.8deg per century, throughout all the 1 Million years of the current 100Ka period ice ages at least, with CO2 overtly a lagging effect of warming throughout the record, never a leading indicator of change.. The sensitivity to CO2 in the present is so low it is unobservable by this comparison.
LA{SE RATE: Also GHE has never controlled the lapse rate to space, that is simply a false assertion. Ask a meteorologist. Solar energy and gravitational pressure create the lapse rate. If it was significant, human caused CO2 could slightly alter the small natural GHE effect on the dominant causes of the natural lapse rate, mainly by water Vapour and less by natural CO2. But it doesn’t, on the observational evidence.
CO2 ABSORPTION: Also see Henry’s law as regards the absorption of CO2 into the natural environment, re atmospheric content variation of gasses absorbed by liquids they are in contact with, fundamental proven science which the IPCC simply ignores in its assertions regarding the process affecting CO2. All the assertions depend on the central and unproven assertion that CO2 is the main cause of climate change, when it demonstrably is not on the facts of observation.
All the evidence anyone honest and capable needs to demonstrate this has become known to science since 2000 or so, in ice cores and other proxy records. Inconvenient. But the UN climate change protection racket, bases its pseudo science of modelling prediction on the unprovable guesses of the modellers, sold by assertion. Requests for proof by scientific method of independent test and validation is now labelled as denial to ensure the rackets continue, made up models now trump observations. By law. For profit from the snake oil cure.
The supposed problem must be believed by the ignorant masses to justify the massive spending on snake oil cures, and hence easy money revenue take from them, enforced by law.
Also control of energy use by the increasingly empowered masses to ensure they are more controllable by the elites. All justified by “science” created by the social manipulators in the UN, based in a self evidently manufactured scientific deceit as I describe, created under the UN Deputy Secretary General and later fugitive fraudster Maurice Strong, and his successors in the role, who funded then promoted the science to prove their fraud as if real, using our money, through global NGOs and national governments. THis IPCC science is clearly false in the fact of its claims versus observations of reality you can check yourself. But still enforced by governments as if real.
Even the UN staff have said many times, in public, this is not about the climate. It’s about increasing the power and wealth of parasitic global elites at the expense of the manipulated masses. I have tried to wrap this sorry story and the truth in a few slides anyone can follow , and check the reality for themselves afterwards. I hope it has merit. Comment welcome. If its deterministic or presentational. No pseudo science please.
The weakness in net zero climate action plans is that net zero doesn’t mean zero.
It means these aspiring climate heroes are really cheating and lying bastards.
Please see
https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/02/25/net-zero/
Thank you Bjorn Lomborg for your reason in the face of climate paranoia. All life dies without CO2. The fake climate crisis has been a lie and a fraud right from its beginnings. We are all, from the simplest unicellular organism to Homo Sapiens Sapiens, carbon-based organisms. Every fat, every protein, every amino acid in our bodies has a carbon molecular backbone. And that carbon backbone of life ALL COMES FROM ONE SOURCE – CARBON DIOXIDE. Plants use sunlight, CO2, and water to absorb all of life’s carbon backbone and to create all of life’s energy (animals have to eat theirs), and as a byproduct, produce every molecule of the atmospheric oxygen required for the animal Kingdom to exist. That is ecology, baby! Photosynthesis makes life solar-powered! And it does not work without CO2. That simple biological fact dwarfs CO2’s insignificant role in climate. Life was born in life luxuriant levels of 9,000ppm CO2 more than three billion years ago. That’s more than twenty times today’s starvation level, 400ppm CO2. All life begins to die nominally at levels of 100-150ppm (within 30ppm of universal death during glacial phases of our current ongoing Pleistocene Quaternary Ice Age). We spend 85% of the time of every one hundred thousand year glacial/interglacial cycle in glacial phases. Today’s current ongoing Holocene interglacial is just the latest of eight hundred thousand years of glacial/interglacial twelve degree C fluctuations of temperature. Interglacials occupying the warmest four degrees C. And glacials occupying the coldest eight degrees C. We think that CO2 levels today are dangerously high. That is complete nonsense. CO2 is far more important to life, than it is to climate. The science of the CO2 fertilization effect proves that life begins to starve for more CO2 at any level below 2,000ppm! Not only has fossil fuels made us the best fed, longest-living, most prosperous human beings that have ever existed. The recycling of CO2 from fossil fuels has given the environment and agriculture the best gift in several million years! More CO2 has made life greener and more abundant (by some estimates as much as 30-40%). More CO2 has also made life more drought tolerant (so much so that, from satellite estimates, significant tracks of earth’s deserts are actually shrinking)! And more CO2 has been perhaps the greatest reason why agriculture is breaking a string of world record crop yields. Something we’re going to need to feed the 10-12 billion people before universal prosperity levels out our human population. We won’t be able to accomplish that without using fossil fuels, baby. And without the environmental gift that is more of life’s most rare and precious ingredient – CO2 – carbon dioxide!
During the late 19th and much of the 20th centuries the left was a necessary, if often misdirected political force. There were many issues that needed addressing including workers’ rights, democratic rights, access to health care and education, as well as environmental protection.
Most of these things that needed doing have since been done and, in many cases, totally over-done. This left a hole in the old left agenda into which the new hard left advanced shamelessly. Their goal is political domination and the destruction of the Western society that the more moderate left helped shape. However, this is not a widely appealing aim when espoused at the ballot box. Therefore, this political wolf needed to be wrapped in the faux sheepskin of environmental protection from the releasing of a gas that had already been in dangerously low proportions for sustainable life on Earth.
We will never extract this truth from the hardcore adherents to this plan. Only lesser adherents, who do not realise the intent behind the seeking of Net Zero, can ever be won over by reason and, even then, merely a fraction of those shall ever see the light, for such is the power of the Orwellian method of political control.
Net zero has never been about science. It is about how much value your democratic vote will have in their desired future (ie. none). If you can’t see the light at night because of a routine blackout, they will have surely won.
The Net Zero is the Zero amount of intelligence from Biden and his Rougue’s Gallery of fiends and scoundrels
Yes, climate change is real. No one doubts that.
But its not man made. We hardly have any influence on our ever changing climate.
Those climate models are man made. Thats were the the problem lies.
You beat me to it. Yes the climate is changing and always will. In fact, given we are entering a solar minimum we are likely to see a climate change not as optimum for us as it gets colder. However Lomborg has been a voice in the wilderness by talking about how the better avenue is not to destroy our economies but to use our wealth to deal with a changing climate.
climate is not man made it is and always been controlled by the earths cycle round the sun and the earths moving axis naturally caused by build up and down by the ice poles getting heavier and lighter as is happening at present as shown on milinkovitch cycles on the webb . If we go into another ice age we will need all the coal powered plants we can build to save peoples lives .