2020 FalseAlarmHowClimateChangePanic
- (Lomborg, 2020) ⇒ Bjørn Lomborg. (2020). “False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet.” In: Hatchette Book Group Inc, UK.
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Section 1: Climate of Fear
Introduction
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... As a result of this fear, around the world children are skipping school to protest against global warming. Why attend classes when the world will end soon? Recently, a Danish first-grader asked her teacher earnestly: “What will we do when the world ends? Where will we go? The rooftops?” Parents can find a glut of online instructions and guides with titles like Parenting in a World Hurtling Toward Catastrophe and On Having Kids at the End of the World. And so, representing her generation’s genuinely held terror, a young girl holds up a sign that says “I’ll die of climate change.”8 …
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... The science shows us that fears of a climate apocalypse are unfounded. Global warming is real, but it is not the end of the world. It is a manageable problem. Yet, we now live in a world where almost half the population believes climate change will extinguish humanity. This has profoundly altered the political reality. It makes us double down on poor climate policies. It makes us increasingly ignore all other challenges, from pandemics and food shortages to political strife and conflicts, or subsume them under the banner of climate change. …
... If we don’t say stop, the current, false climate alarm, despite its good intentions, is likely to leave the world much worse off than it could be… We need to dial back on the panic, look at the science, face the economics, and address the issue rationally.”
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Extreme Weather or Extreme Exaggeration?
... But is weather really getting more extreme globally? Are there more and more severe droughts, hurricanes, floods, and fires? To answer these questions, I am going to outline what the science says. As a general rule, I will base findings on what the United Nations’ climate scientists — the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC—have found. Their reports are generally considered the gold standard, since their work is careful and robust, written by large teams of top scientists from around the world. To see what we should expect just for the United States, I will also bring in official government findings from the US National Climate Assessment. Many of these findings run against the meta-narrative that everything is getting worse. They seem counterintuitive because we are accustomed to thinking that natural disasters are ever worsening due to climate change. So what really is going on? Part of the problem is the media. Newspapers fill their pages with stories of bad news because “everything is just fine” isn’t a news story. For the past thirty years, polls show, the vast majority of the US population has believed that crime is getting worse, even though statistics repeatedly demonstrate that crime is falling, often quite precipitously. This disconnect can largely be explained by the fact that regardless of how much crime is reduced, there will always be enough to fill newspapers and TV shows every day with horrific stories. Media coverage can help shape a perception that crime is getting more rampant even if statistics show otherwise. Politicians amplify the problem by talking up crime to show themselves “tough on crime,” and so statistical reality and public opinion diverge even further.2 We are witnessing a similar dynamic when it comes to the effects of climate change. Stories of extreme weather are dramatic—flames engulfing Los Angeles highways, reporters bracing themselves against heavy rains and winds on camera, flood victims rowing through what used to be city streets. Unsurprisingly, people are riveted, and the media dishes up as many of these stories as it can. Global warming is an easy shorthand for explaining these disasters, and many politicians leap in to proclaim themselves “tough on climate change.” The scientific facts are left behind because the narrative feels true. …
Section 3: How Not to Fix Climate Change
10.
... In one 2016 study looking at energy options for Bangladesh, researchers found that building more coal-fired power plants would generate global climate damage costing around $592 million over the next fifteen years, but the benefits from electrification would be almost five hundred times greater at $258 billion, equivalent to more than an entire year of the nation’s GDP. By 2030, the average Bangladeshi would be 16 percent better off.30 Denying Bangladesh this benefit in the name of reducing the impact of climate change is fantastically arrogant: for every 23¢ of global climate damage that we could avoid, we are asking Bangladesh to forego $100 of prosperity and development. And Bangladesh is a nation where energy shortages cost an estimated 0.5 percent of GDP, and around twenty-one million people live in extreme poverty.31 From the comfort of the World Economic Forum’s 2017 annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, former US vice president Al Gore tut-tutted about plans to build coal-fired power plants in Bangladesh. But Bangladeshi prime minister Sheikh Hasina slapped that down, pointing out: “If you cannot develop the economic conditions of your people, then how will you save our people? We have to ensure the food security; we have to give them job opportunity.”32 Sheikh Hasina is right. Choosing expensive carbon-cutting policies or insisting on green development approaches might seem like an easy choice for the world’s elite in Washington, DC, or Paris, France, but the burden of these choices falls unfairly on the world’s poor, and especially on those living in abject poverty. They need more energy, not moralizing from the West. It is perverse to hear rich people piously claim that we should help the world’s poor by cutting carbon dioxide to make their future slightly less worse, when we have huge opportunities to make their lives much better, much more quickly, and much more effectively. …
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... Emissions of carbon dioxide are largely by-products of productivity-- of industry, governments, and individuals producing things that we want more of (including heating, cooling, food, transport, hospital care, and so much more)..When countries promise to reduce their emissions, they are effectively promising to make all these things a touch more expensive. That acts as a slight brake on the economy, leading to a small reduction in growth…
This cost is the relevant social cost of climate policies-- the reduction in welfare that comes from each nation insisting on using energy that is slightly more costly and less reliable than fossil fuels. -p. 112” ...
We must rein in temperature increases and help ensure that the most vulnerable can adapt. But today’s popular climate change policies of rolling out solar panels and wind turbines have insidious effects: they push up energy costs, hurt the poor, cut emissions ineffectively, and put us on an unsustainable pathway where taxpayers are eventually likely to revolt. Instead, we need to invest in innovation, smart carbon taxes, R&D into geoengineering, and adaptation...Making the world richer is also important...The richer people are, the more resilient they will be in the face of global warming. -p. 218” ...
When a company (e.g. Enron) is calling for more environmental regulation, we need to look very carefully at what they might stand to gain from it… I don’t believe that there is some kind of grand conspiracy to promote scare stories about environmental crisis. I do believe that companies, the media, and politicians benefit from those stories. This confluence of interests goes a long way to explaining why the conversation surrounding climate change has become so detached from scientific reality. -p. 217” ...
Adaptation is very effective at cooling cities, (e.g.) cool roofs and pavements… Adaptive actions can typically deliver much more protection much faster and at a lower cost than any realistic carbon-reduction climate policy. -pp. 192, 194 ...
‘Geoengineering’ essentially means deliberately adjusting the planet’s temperature control...It is a partial solution to climate change that is worth RESEARCHING. (It is) a backup plan that we could turn to, if we don’t manage to get everyone to do everything needed on carbon taxes, innovation, and adaptation.” Examples: stratosphereic aerosol injection (“which mimics a volcano’s effect on the climate, without the carnage” -p. 196), “marine cloud brightening (“increase the number of salt sea particles in the air over the oceans...whiter clouds reflect more solar energy back into space, thus cooling the planet -p 196) ...
Lifting counties out of poverty is an essential but underdiscussed approach to mitigating the damage of climate change… If you’re poor, you burn cheap, dirty fuel. If you’re richer, you can afford to subsidize wind turbines. -p. 203, 204” ...
“Innovation has helped with problems in the past, e.g. whale oil use, horse manure in the streets, increasing grain yields. “When we innovate and find a cheap, technological solution, we solve major challenges and generate broadly shared benefits. We need to apply that lesson to the problem of climate change.” -p. 169 ...
The fracking innovation was not intended as climate policy, but simply as a way to make the United States more energy independent and richer. But it also turned out to have a huge climate change benefit, because gas became cheaper than coal...This is the main reason why the United States has seen the largest reduction in carbon dioxide emissions of any nation over the past decade.” -pp. 170-1 ...
Energy storage is one area where innovation could make a huge difference to human welfare...storage could deliver energy when we need it rather than when nature deigns to provide it. -p. 175 ...
An “obvious area for R&D investment is nuclear energy. Nuclear energy doesn’t emit carbon dioxide (and) is also very safe… it kills about two thousand times fewer people than coal power, because of coal’s massive pollution.” -p. 177 ...
Air capture (e.g. trees) “sucks carbon dioxide from the air and stores it safely.” -p. 178 More R&D could improve air capture. ...
Through innovation, we could solve the problem of fossil fuels in the old-fashioned and proven way-- by making the alternatives cheaper and better. -p. 182 ...
A carbon tax forces you to take into account the climate disbenefits that your purchase is responsible for, so you can weigh these against the benefit… “It doesn’t just show consumers which products are carbon intensive and should be used more sparingly, but it helps energy producers move toward lower carbon dioxide emissions (perhaps through more reliance on solar and wind energy), and it encourages innovators to come up with new, lower-carbon processes and products.” -p. 153 ...
“When politicians and campaigners talk about extremely drastic climate policies, they don’t acknowledge, and perhaps don’t even realize, that those policies have a cost to society vastly greater than the costs of the damage they are trying to avoid...Climate policies have a small upside (that we should exploit) and a potentially very large downside.” -p. 160, 162-3 ...
“But what happens if we aim to enact much more ambitious climate targets, through much higher carbon taxes?...Compared to the 3 percent loss from doing nothing, doing too much is far worse. In an attempt to ameliorate climate change, we will end up avoiding more of the climate damage costs, but saddle the world with climate policies so expensive that the total costs almost triple. The cure is much worse than the disease.” -p. 165” Choosing expensive carbon-cutting policies or insisting on green development approaches might seem like an easy choice for the world’s elite in Washington, DC, or Paris, France, but the burden of these choices falls unfairly on the world’s poor, and especially on those living in abject poverty. They need more energy, not moralizing from the West. It is perverse to hear rich people piously claim that we should help the world’s poor by cutting carbon dioxide to make their future slightly less worse, when we have huge opportunities to make their lives much better, much more quickly, and much more effectively.” -p. 147 ...
“When we see a malnourished child or a town hit by a hurricane and seriously suggest that we should make lives better by cutting a ton of carbon dioxide, we are not actually trying to do good, but rather imposing our own priorities on people who have little power to assert their own… We’ve committed to spending $1 trillion to $2 trillion a year just on the almost entirely ineffective Paris Agreement. Every MONTH the cost will be the same as the amount that could lift EVERYONE from extreme poverty. This strikes me as obscene.” -p. 148 ...
Cold homes are one of the leading causes of deaths in winter… A climate policy reversing the price reduction due to fracking will drive energy prices back up. People will be less able to heat their homes, and the consequent death rate will go back up.” -p. 144 ...
The negative impacts (of biofuels) were much greater than most had anticipated...the amount of crops needed to fill an SUV’s fuel tank with biofuel would feed a child for an entire year, and every gallon of biofuel wiped out forty meals… “A srong climate campaigner called the subsidies driving the biofuel industry’s growth ‘a crime against humanity.’ Yet, vested agricultural interests had made the bad policies almost impossible to overturn. It seems that we have learned little from recent history, as we plow headlong into new policies that will similarly hurt the world’s poor.” -pp. 142-3” The Paris Agreement will have no perceptible impact on malaria because it will lead to such small temperature changes; in fact, it is very likely that its total impact will actually lead to MORE malaria deaths...because (the climate policies) delay the time when nations get rich enough to see the final eradication of malaria.” -p. 142 ...
Climate policies often make life WORSE specifically for the poor...Choosing climate policies over growth policies doesn’t just do nothing. It means more people die avoidable deaths… Lifting incomes significantly reduces the damage from any potential climate-change-caused increase in hurricanes, droughts, and floods...A comprehensive study...shows that strong global action to reduce climate change would cause far more hunger and food insecurity than climate change itself.” -pp. 135, 137, 138 ...
By making people richer, especially in the world’s poorest countries, freer trade would also lead to societies far more resilient to climate shocks, more capable of investing in adaptation, and far less vulnerable to rising temperatures. In that way, free trade can be considered a smart CLIMATE policy as well as an excellent way to promote human thriving generally. -p. 220 ...
The Paris Agreement will cost a fortune to carry out and do almost no good… Every single major industrialized country is failing to live up to the promises it made under the Paris Agreement, and the few countries on track are too small to make any significant impact at all...Spending trillions to achieve almost nothing is, not surprisingly, a bad idea. Every dollar spent will produce climate benefits worth just 11 cents. ...
P. 111, 118, 123” Biomass, which basically is a fancy-sounding name for wood, is one of the old, reliable renewables that can produce energy when it is needed. The problem for the planet is that wood is often imported from US forests in diesel-driven ships, and emits MORE carbon dioxide than even coal when it is burned. Biomass is categorized by the EU only as carbon dioxide free because it is hoped that felled trees will be replanted and over many future decades will soak up as much carbon dioxide as was released by its burning. Needless to say, this is dubious accounting at best.” -p. 108 ...
The jarring fact is that humanity just finished spending two centuries GETTING RID OF renewable energy and replacing it with fossil fuels. When everyone was poor, the whole world cooked and kept warm using polluting renewable energy sources like wood and dung...In the poor world, replacing fossil fuels with new renewable energy sources like wind and solar power is hard because most people desperately want MUCH MORE power at lower cost, not fickle power at high cost.” -pp. 104-5 ...
What matters most is that we make sure that the most vulnerable, worst-off people living in shantytowns are lifted out of poverty. It is growth, not carbon dioxide reductions, that will prevent the harrowing losses that the world’s poorest endure as a result of hurricanes.” -p. 73 ...
Neither the human nor the relative financial cost of weather-related disasters has actually increased as a result of climate change… resiliency has outpaced any potential increase in the incidence of disasters.” -pp. 75, 76” ...
We should not confuse the rising costs of flooding with flooding itself (or indeed with climate change). It is entirely caused by more houses and more wealth; in fact, the cost compared to the US national income had declined almost tenfold. If we want to reduce this amount even more, the solution isn’t to be found in radically reducing carbon dioxide levels. The solution is to stop building lots of big, expensive houses in flood zones… “Any disaster today will cause more damage because there are more homes, factories, office buildings, and infrastructure to destroy.” -pp. 66, 74” ...
Global temperature and GDP are both rising, and each affects the other… We have to find the right balance between the two factors. If we focus solely on growing global GDP, we risk temperatures rising to such an extent that the negative impact on our well-being will more than offset the benefits brought about by extra growth. Yet, if we try to cut as much carbon dioxide as we can, out of a sense of panic, we could easily end up reducing human well-being to a degree that far offsets any environmental benefits we achieve.” -p. 46” ...
The expanding bull’s eye effect means we’re likely to see much more costly disasters happen over time, even if the climate doesn’t change at all… In reality, much (and often all) we’re seeing is that more people with more stuff live in harm’s way.” -p. 37 ...
We also need to stop believing that any story with climate in it is best solved through climate policies… Even if we went all-in and spent hundreds of trillions on climate policies, SEA LEVELS WOULD STILL RISE, ONLY SLIGHTLY LESS than if we did nothing. Millions would still get flooded. 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.” -p. 37” People are panicking about climate change in large part because the media and environmental campaigners tell us to, because politicians overhype the likely effects, and because scientific research is often communicated without crucial context…: humans adapt to their changing earth. They have for millenia… “We don’t just use up the iron or gas that is there and then give up. We get better at finding more, at lower cost, in effect allowing humanity access to ever more and ever cheaper resources… “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.” -p. 19, 29, 35” ...
We should be innovating tomorrow’s technologies rather than erecting today’s inefficient turbines and solar panels. We should explore fusion, fission, water splitting, ...algae grown on the ocean surface that produces oil… 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.” -pp. 14, 15” ...
One of the great ironies of climate change activism today is that many of the movement’s most vocal proponents are also horrified by global income inequality. They are blind, however, to the fact that the costs of the policies they demand will be borne disproportionately by the world’s poorest. This is because so much of climate change policy boils down to limiting access to cheap energy… “Countries in the developing world need cheap and reliable energy, for now mostly from fossil fuels, to promote industry and growth. Not surprisingly, a recent study of the consequences of implementing the Paris Agreement showed that it will actually increase poverty.” -pp. 11, 12 ...
== References ==;
| Author | volume | Date Value | title | type | journal | titleUrl | doi | note | year | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 FalseAlarmHowClimateChangePanic | Bjørn Lomborg | False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet | 2020 |