Biden’s local weather repair is fantastically costly and utterly ineffective – Björn Lomborg – Watts Up With That?
Repost from NOT MANY PEOPLE KNOW THAT
FEBRUARY 14, 2021
By Paul Homewood
All over the world politicians are doing their best to promise fantastically expensive climate policies. President Biden has promised to spend $ 500 billion each year on climate – about 13 percent of total federal revenues. The European Union will spend 25 percent of its budget on the climate.
Most rich countries now promise to become carbon neutral by the middle of the century. Amazingly, only one country has made a serious, independent estimate of the costs: New Zealand found that by then it would be optimistic about 16 percent of its GDP, which is the total current New Zealand budget.
The corresponding cost to the US and EU would be more than $ 5 trillion. Each year. That is more than the entire US federal budget or more than all EU governments spend on education, leisure, housing, the environment, the economy, the police, the courts, defense and health.
Significantly, the Vice President of the European Commission, Frans Timmermans, recently admitted that climate policy would be so costly that without large, protective border taxes, it would be a “matter of survival for our industry”.
Climate change is a real man-made problem. However, the impact is much smaller than the breathless climate report suggests. The UN Climate Panel notes that if we do nothing, the overall impact of climate in the 2070s will be an income cut of 0.2 to 2 percent. Given that by then everyone is expected to be 363 percent as rich as they are today, climate change means that we will be “only” 356 percent as rich. Not the end of the world.
Climate policy could end up doing a lot more harm if growth is drastically reduced. For rich countries, lower growth means higher risk of protests and political breakdown. This is not surprising. If you live in an emerging economy, you know that you and your children will be much better off in the years to come. Therefore, forgive the present more.
When the growth is almost non-existent, the world turns into a zero-sum experience. Better conditions for others are likely to mean worse conditions for you, leading to a loss of social cohesion and confidence in a rewarding future. The anti-eco-tax protests, which have dwarfed France since 2018, could become an integral part of many or most wealthy societies.
Politicians, however, are obsessed with the climate. Growth-killing “corrections” would excite some job-savvy academics, but they would lead to tragic consequences of stagnation, argument and discord for ordinary people.
Most voters are unwilling to pay for this extravagant climate policy. While Biden suggests spending the equivalent of $ 1,500 per American per year, a recent Washington Post poll found that more than half of the population didn’t want to pay even $ 24.
And what for? If all rich countries in the world were to reduce their CO2 emissions to zero tomorrow and for the rest of the century, efforts by 2100 would result in an almost imperceptible drop in temperature.
This is because more than three quarters of global emissions for the rest of this century will come from Asia, Africa and Latin America. These nations are determined to lift their people out of poverty and ensure broad development with abundant energy, mostly from cheap fossil fuels.
The last 30 years of climate policy have resulted in high costs and rising emissions. The only reliable ways to reduce emissions have been recessions and the COVID-19 lockdowns, both of which are uncomfortable. The expectation that nations will stop using cheap energy will not succeed. We need innovation.
Take the terrible air pollution in Los Angeles in the 1950s. It wasn’t fixed by naively asking people to stop driving. Instead, it was fixed through innovation – the catalytic converter allowed people to keep driving and still pollute little. We need to invest in research to make green energy much cheaper: from better sun, wind and batteries to cheaper fission, fusion and carbon capture.
We should spend tens of billions to improve the price of green energy from fossil fuels. Spending trillions on huge and early emissions reductions is an unsustainable and ineffective First World approach.
https://nypost.com/2021/02/09/bidens-climate-fix-is-fantastically-expensive-and-perfectly-useless/
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