By Paul Homewood | New York Post
Across the world, politicians
are going out of their way to promise fantastically expensive climate policies.
President Biden has promised to spend $500 billion each year
on climate — about 13
percent of the entire federal revenue. The European Union will spend 25 percent
of its budget on climate.
Most rich countries now
promise to go carbon-neutral by mid-century. Shockingly, only one country has
made a serious, independent estimate of the cost: New Zealand found it would
optimistically cost 16 percent of its GDP by then, equivalent to the entire
current New Zealand budget.
The equivalent cost for the US
and the EU would be more than $5 trillion. Each and every year. That is more
than the entire US federal budget, or more than the EU governments spend across
all budgets for education, recreation, housing, environment, economic affairs,
police, courts, defense and health.
Tellingly, the European
Commission Vice President Frans Timmermans recently admitted that climate
policies would be so costly, it would be a “matter of survival for our
industry” without huge, protective border taxes.
Climate change is a real,
manmade problem. But its impacts are much lower than breathless climate
reporting would suggest. The UN Climate Panel finds that if we do nothing, the
total impact of climate in the 2070s will be equivalent to reducing incomes by
0.2-2 percent. Given that by then, each person is expected to be 363 percent as
rich as today, climate change means we will “only” be 356 percent as rich. Not
the end of the world.
Climate policies could end up
hurting much more by dramatically cutting growth. For rich countries, lower
growth means higher risks of protests and political breakdown. This isn’t
surprising. If you live in a burgeoning economy, you know that you and your
children will be much better off in the coming years. Hence, you are more
forgiving of the present.
If growth is almost absent,
the world turns to a zero-sum experience. Better conditions for others likely
mean worse conditions for you, resulting in a loss of social cohesion and trust
in a worthwhile future. The yellow-vest protests against eco-taxes that have
rankled France since 2018 could become a permanent feature of many or most rich
societies.
Yet politicians obsessively
focus on climate. Growth-killing “fixes” would delight a few job-secure
academics, but they would lead to tragic outcomes of stagnation, strife and
discord for ordinary people.
Most voters aren’t willing to
pay for these extravagant climate policies. While Biden proposes spending the
equivalent of $1,500 per American per year, a recent Washington Post survey
showed that more than half the population was unwilling to pay even $24.
And for what? If all the rich
countries in the world were to cut their carbon emissions to zero tomorrow and
for the rest of the century, the effort would make an almost unnoticeable
reduction in temperatures by 2100.
This is because more than
three-quarters of the global emissions in the rest of this century will come
from Asia, Africa and Latin America. These nations are determined to lift their
populations out of poverty and ensure broad development using plentiful energy,
mostly from cheap fossil fuels.
The last 30 years of climate
policy have delivered high costs and rising emissions. The only reliable ways
to cut emissions have been recessions and the COVID-19 lockdowns, both of which
are unpalatable. Expecting nations to stop using cheap energy won’t succeed. We
need innovation.
Take the terrible air
pollution in Los Angeles in the 1950s. It wasn’t fixed by naïvely asking people
to stop driving cars. Instead, it was fixed through innovation — the catalytic
converter allowed people to drive further yet pollute little. We need to invest
in research to make green energy much cheaper: from better solar, wind and
batteries to cheaper fission, fusion and carbon capture.
We should spend tens of
billions to innovate the price of green energy below fossil fuels. Spending
trillions on enormous and premature emissions cuts is an unsustainable and
ineffective First World approach.
https://nypost.com/2021/02/09/bidens-climate-fix-is-fantastically-expensive-and-perfectly-useless/
