How glorious it is that the demands of Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion are coming true. We are putting a significant brake on carbon emissions by strongly limiting the rampant overconsumption of our society.
Granted, no one seems very happy at those carbon dioxide emissions falling by 5% – or 2.5 billion tonnes – this year, but we can’t have everything, can we?
This gets to the nub of the problem with the climate change movement. We know pretty well we could reverse the problem if we all agree to become as poor as church mice or return to being peasants in the fields.
It is the understandable resistance to such reversion which causes the problem itself. We like being able to heat our food, warm our bodies, travel and generally enjoy civilization.
That, at this current level of technological advance, means the use of fossil fuels – at the cost of changes to the climate in the future.
The question is not whether we should do something about it, but what?
The coronavirus outbreak gives us a neat experiment in what happens when humans suddenly dramatically reduce both production and consumption. And, to put it mildly, most of us are not enjoying it one bit.
That suggests that instead of the hair shirty favored by the Gretas of this world, our best solution is creating the technologies that allow us to keep consuming while also keeping the planet cool with our doing so.
This is not particularly controversial stuff. The economist William Nordhaus got his Nobel for demonstrating how innovation can produce better outcomes with lower consumption.
The same is true of Nicholas Stern, whose name adorns one of the best-known reports on the consequences of climate change.
Sure, there are differences between the two approaches. Stern says do lots now – as a very rough pencil sketch you understand – while Nordhaus says only do what we’re ready for.
More specifically, Nordhaus says work with the capital cycle. Only replace things with the newer non-emitting technology when they are already worn out and ready for replacement anyway.
That would not mean, for example, closing down Germany’s nuclear plants when they have decades of useful life left – a policy that has simply made energy more expensive while doing worse than nothing to save the planet.
Instead, things should be shut down when they are no longer functional and replaced with newer, cleaner tech.
The underlying point here is that both Nordhaus and Stern thinking like economists whose aim is to maximize human utility – essentially, the joy of being here and alive at this time.
As Ryan Bourne noted in a recent CapX piece, economists are forever thinking in terms of costs and benefits and trying to balance them out.
They know too that with a great many facets of our lives there is no simple ‘solution’, just a variety of trade-offs that need to be managed.
That’s quite a different approach to the currently fashionable claim that we must eviscerate modern society right now and retreat back to a much lower standard of living as our method of reducing those emissions.
For that is what a ‘zero carbon’ society by 2030, or even 2050 is liable to mean in real terms – the guarantee of immediate penury for millions of people.
There are few silver linings to the current ghastly pandemic. But one of the benefits is we’re testing the St. Greta method of beating climate change and not liking it very much at all.
Let’s hope that means policymakers focus on the technological and economic solutions to climate change, rather than the shrill eschatology of the modern green movement.
Read more at CapX
Greta is a perfect example of whats wrong with the school these day her and David Hogg are two perfect example of just how bad the school systems are
“… economic solutions …
I believe it was in one of Dr Peter’s books. ” Give a problem to five different economists – you’ll get five different answers – six if one of them went to Harvard.”
As I write 19GW of UK’s wind capacity is producing2GW. Or 48GWH over 24hrs. A sunny day yesterday produced about 25GWH SOLAR. But not at night. UK’s electricity need was about 7200GWH a day. Low actually.
Look at the picture.
She really IS ugly.
Green phlegm.
Here’s my great big conspiracy theory….. if the anarchists get their way, the planet’s human population will decline dramatically.
Who first practised population control?
China. One child only per couple. One result was infanticide.
The United Nations runs interference for China day in, day out. China plays with viruses like a kid plays with matches, but the WHO praises their behaviour. How many people died from the Wuhan virus? We’ll never know. Life is cheap in the Third World.
Green energy is obviously inadequate for 7 billion of us.
She is repeating the same old gobbeldy gook they were preaching about back in the early days of the Eco-Freak Movement
This article has some serious errors. It assumes that anthropological climate change is a problem. The assumption is not at all true. Forgive me for repeating this too often, but INMCM5, the climate model that most closely matches real world data, only predicts warming of 1.4 degrees by 2100. Tim Worstall is right that power plants shouldn’t be replaced until they are worn out, but he is wrong that there is an acceptable alternative other than fossil fuels. Nuclear comes the closest but it is still a lot more expensive. Wind and solar are a lot more expensive as Germany has demonstrated and these sources are also unreliable. Hydroelectric is great but there isn’t enough of it. Scientists have been working on other technologies for decades and do not appear to be close to an economic solution. The real discovery that needs to be made by politicians is that anthropological climate change is a fraud and we can continue to use fossil fuels.
True, David. Could not have said it better myself. That article is obviously written by someone who believes in the fraud of CAGW, attempting to dress it up as the opposite! Of course, many of we “Deniers” support the idea of the development of nuclear power generation, but in the meantime we know that fossil fuels will continue to provide the improvement in living conditions for all of those countries which can afford it and realise that the gospel preached by Saint Greta is ignorant nonsense.
“anthropogenic”, not “anthropological”
They will soon have us all back in the Dark Ages fearing a Solar Ecypes and hiding when the sun gose dim