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July 27 - September 16, 2024
A 2019 Washington Post survey showed that of American children ages thirteen to seventeen, 57 percent feel afraid about climate change, 52 percent feel angry, and 42 percent feel guilty. A 2012 academic study of children ages ten to twelve from three schools in Denver found that 82 percent expressed fear, sadness, and anger when discussing their feelings about the environment,
Over the past twenty years, climate scientists have painstakingly increased knowledge about climate change, and we have more—and more reliable—data than ever before. But at the same time, the rhetoric that comes from commentators and the media has become increasingly irrational.
This singular obsession with climate change means that we are now going from wasting billions of dollars on ineffective policies to wasting trillions. At the same time, we’re ignoring ever more of the world’s more urgent and much more tractable challenges. And we’re scaring kids and adults witless, which is not just factually wrong but morally reprehensible.
If politicians asked scientists how to limit the number of deaths to an almost impossible target of zero, one good answer would be to set the national speed limit to three miles per hour. Nobody would die. But science is not telling us that we must have a speed limit of three miles per hour—it only informs us that if we want zero dead, one simple way to achieve that is through a nationwide, heavily enforced three-mile-per-hour speed limit.
This means that instead of seeing incomes rise to 450 percent by 2100, they might increase “only” to 434 percent.
But because of the fear-mongering surrounding climate change, most people don’t hear the good news. And because we believe that climate change is a much bigger challenge than it really is, many countries are spending more and more to combat it, and spending it in less and less sensible ways. Evidence shows that globally we are now spending more than $400 billion annually on climate change, through investments in renewables, in subsidies, and in lost growth.
However, it turns out that the Paris Agreement in its best-case scenario will achieve just one percent of what the politicians have promised (keeping temperature rises to 1.5°C [2.7°F]), and at huge cost. It is simply a bad deal for the world.20
Across the world, people are saying they’re willing to pay $100–$200 a year to address climate change. A 2019 Washington Post survey showed that while more than three-quarters of all Americans think climate change is a crisis or major problem, a majority was unwilling to spend even $24 a year on fixing it. Yet, the commonly proposed policies will cost many thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars per person per year.
When energy becomes more expensive, we all end up paying more to heat our houses. But because the poor use a larger share of their incomes on energy, a price increase burdens them the most. In the rich world, an estimated two hundred million people already suffer from energy poverty, meaning energy sucks up one-tenth or more of their income.
In fact, financial benefits from climate policies (like subsidies given to a homeowner for erecting a solar panel or insulating a house, or driving a Tesla) overwhelmingly go to the richest.
For poor countries, climate policy threatens to crowd out the much more important issues of health, education, jobs, and nutrition. These are the issues that, if addressed appropriately, we know will help lift the developing world out of poverty and generate a much better future.
Carbon dioxide is a by-product of a society with access to reliable and cheap energy, which helps produce all the things that make it good: food, heating, cooling, transportation, and so on. Restricting access to more costly and/or less reliable energy incurs higher costs that reduce economic growth.
In the case of carbon dioxide, the best research on costs and benefits shows that we should cut some, but by no means all, carbon dioxide emissions. We should do so through a carbon tax, starting out rather low at $20 per ton of emissions (equivalent to an 18¢ per gallon tax on gasoline) and slowly increasing it over the century.
Cutting some carbon dioxide makes a lot of sense. First, it is easy to cut the first tons, because these are the lowest-hanging fruit. There are many places where efficiency can be obtained at low cost.
equivalent to tens or hundreds of dollars per gallon of gasoline in order to effectively prohibit carbon dioxide emissions in short order. This would cost us about 3.4 percent more of total global GDP. Yet, the extra benefits would be much lower at about 1 percent, making the world overall worse off.
It is much more likely that such panicked climate solutions would be done badly and ineffectively, which could make the total costs incredibly large. We would in essence be paying a fantastically high price for little extra benefit.
Second, we need to look at smarter solutions to climate change. Top climate economists agree that the best way to combat its negative effects is to invest in green innovation. We should be innovating tomorrow’s technologies rather than erecting today’s inefficient turbines and solar panels.
We should explore fusion, fission, water splitting, and more. We can research algae grown on the ocean surface that produces oil. Because the algae converts sunlight and carbon dioxide to oil, burning that oil will not release any new carbon dioxide. Oil algae are far from cost effective now, but researching this and many other solutions is not only cheap but also offers our best opportunity to find real breakthrough technologies.
The models show that each dollar invested in green energy research and development (R&D) will avoid $11 of climate damage. This will be hundreds of times more effective than current climate policies.
This is one more cost of the relentless alarmism. Since we’re so intent on doing something right now, even if it is almost trivial, we neglect to focus on the technological breakthroughs that in the long run could actually allow humanity to move away from fossil fuels.
Humans have proven themselves to be ingenious masters at adaptation. We can look to Bangladesh, which has massively lowered the death toll from tropical cyclones since the 1970s by investing in smart disaster preparation and better building codes,
Scientists suggest we could replicate such a volcanic effect and cool the world a lot at a very low cost. It could also cool the world very quickly, in a matter of days or weeks. In that way, geoengineering could provide us with a potential backup policy if, for instance, we find that the West Antarctic ice sheet has started melting precipitously.
People in rich countries, having much better education, health, and nutrition, tend to be more afraid of climate change, but even for Europeans climate rises only to the tenth-highest concern. For the world’s poorest, climate is robustly last.
Making a community more resilient and prosperous means more people are able to invest in adaptation and preparedness, and are far less vulnerable to climate shocks. It turns out that helping the extremely poor improve their circumstances also helps them the most with tackling climate.
Too often, the missing context is the most obvious fact of all: humans adapt to their changing earth. They have for millennia and will continue to do so. Any projection of the impact of climate change that fails to take this into account is not realistic.
Indeed, in the latest research summarizing all these studies for Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, Kiribati, French Polynesia, the Maldives, and Tuvalu, it turns out that accretion has beaten out sea level rise on all atolls and all larger islands. Despite sea level rising over recent decades, all atolls studied have increased in area, and all the larger islands studied either remained stable or increased in size.
Both maps simply show what everyone knows: people in the Mekong Delta literally live on the water. In South Vietnam’s An Giang province, almost all land that is not mountainous is protected by a dike. It is “underwater” in the same way that much of Holland is: large swathes of land including Schiphol, the world’s fourteenth-largest airport, are quite literally built under the high-tide mark. In London, almost a million people live below that level. But nobody in Holland, London, or the Mekong Delta needs scuba gear to get around, because humanity has adapted with dikes and flood protection.
The real news is that an increase of forty million people living below the high-tide mark will be a slight worsening of a challenge that we have shown ourselves completely capable of solving, in a world that will be much wealthier and more resilient than it is today. Context matters.
This dramatic misrepresentation is crucial, because claiming that we have just twelve years left is one of the reasons why children are striking from school, cities and countries are declaring “climate emergencies,” and many people are even suggesting we consider suspending democracy to fight this existential threat.
According to official estimates, even if China implements all of its green promises, renewables will reach only 18 percent in 2040, with 76 percent of its energy use still coming from fossil fuels. Holding China up as a green leader is a false narrative that tells us more about the storytellers
Applying these, the scientists predicted with great confidence that gold would run out by 1979, along with a huge range of important resources that humanity depends on—aluminum, copper, lead, mercury, molybdenum, natural gas, oil, silver, tin, tungsten, and zinc would run out before 2004.
Oil was supposed to run out in 1990, according to these thinkers and their computer simulations, and natural gas in 1992, but reserves for both are actually larger today than in 1970, although we consume dramatically more of each. Shale gas alone has doubled US potential gas resources within the past six years and halved the price.
THE STORY OF the Club of Rome is important because lots of people are making exactly the same mistake now when they study and report on climate change: they are leaving out our remarkable ability for adaptation. Much of the alarmism surrounding the topic can be explained by this one fact: the stories assume that while the climate will change, nothing else will.
Under realistic assumptions, the number of people displaced in an extreme scenario of high sea level rise falls from 187 million to 305,000. The worst-case flooding will displace less than 1/600th of the figure in the headlines.
For climate change to cause $14 trillion of damage, we must assume that not a single country will ever increase the heights of any of its dikes beyond their present levels. They will steadfastly keep their protective walls too low, even as sea levels rise over the century, and even as these countries become much richer (as they will) and able to afford much more protection.
The reality is that while the amount of carbon dioxide emitted has a comparatively small impact on the number of people flooded, even with the largest carbon emissions and the highest sea level rise, there will be many fewer people flooded because of adaptation, especially in a world that is richer
As a result, by 2018 heat-related hospitalizations in France were lower than they had been in earlier, cooler years. And Spain cut heat-related deaths between 1980 and 2015, even while average summer temperatures rose almost 2°F (1°
A headline rewritten for accuracy would read: “Thousands Fewer Americans Will Die Because of Air Conditioning; Paris Treaty Not Relevant to Story.” Once the human propensity for adaptation is taken into account, the numbers on climate change start looking a lot less scary. And adaptation should always be factored into any climate change study, because humans are always adapting.
Wrong. The reality is that these weather events both in number and severity have stayed the same or even declined over the past century, as we will discuss in chapter 3. However, the cost of these events is getting much higher, for reasons that have little to do with climate.
A hurricane or flood hitting a sparsely populated Florida in 1900 would have done relatively little damage. Since then, the coastal population of Florida has increased sixty-seven-fold. Thus, a similar-strength hurricane or flood hitting a densely populated, wealthy Florida in 2020 leads to much higher costs. The higher cost is not because hurricanes changed, but because society changed.
This is a well-known phenomenon called the “expanding bull’s-eye effect”: similar climate impacts will result in much more costly disasters because an increasing number of people with more and more valuable assets are at risk. The expanding bull’s-eye effect can be thought of as an archery target, with the rings (showing population density) telling us how many people and possessions are at risk of being hit by an imaginary arrow, or natural disaster
Similarly, a hurricane charging through downtown Miami in 1940 would have wrecked twenty-four thousand homes. The same hurricane hitting today would destroy about a million much more expensive homes.
If we instead went all-in on adaptation, we could for less than a hundredth of the cost save almost everyone. The same with heat deaths; focusing on climate policies costs vastly more yet helps much, much less than air conditioning.
Only when the screaming stops will we finally be able to identify the most effective ways to both address global warming and actually help people with their real-world problems.
Think of the atmosphere as a bathtub, and carbon dioxide as water. We keep pouring new carbon dioxide into the bathtub, and the plug hole (oceans and forests) allows for about half of the addition to drain away.
That is what we see on the right: the global average temperature will increase to 7.4°F higher than it was in preindustrial times (the change in temperature would be zero in 1750 if the graph were extended leftward to that year).
Even if rich countries completely curtail all emissions (an impossible scenario), overall carbon dioxide content continues to rise, and the temperature continues to rise with it. So, the temperature increase is smaller, but only a tiny bit smaller. Even after eight decades, the difference is just below 0.8°
Since the United States emits just over 40 percent of rich country carbon dioxide, in this scenario the effect of just the US going to zero fossil fuels from today onward would be a reduction in temperatures of about 0.33°F in 2100.
Economic growth means that poverty is massively reduced, but at the same time it drives environmental problems like global warming.
When people emerge from poverty, they turn to cleaner gas or electricity as fuel sources. Since 1990, the death risk from indoor air pollution has dropped by 58 percent, mostly because of the increase in GDP per person in the developing world.
