One of the most straightforward questions you can ask a Climate Cultist is: for every billion or trillion dollars we spend on ‘Net Zero’, how many degrees lower will the temperature be in 100 years? They can never answer. Not least because climate is a chaotic system. Sure, there is a direct relationship between atmospheric CO₂ and temperature – in the absence of all other factors.
It just so happens that, in the real world, there a whole lot of other factors. Which makes confident claims that reducing emissions will lower temperatures by any set amount complete bunkum.
So, why are we spending such vast fortunes on reducing emissions, and crippling our economies and industrial base to boot? If Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping had cooked up the whole ‘climate’ narrative as a psyop to critically weaken the West, they couldn’t have done a better job.
Which isn’t to deny that the climate isn’t changing. Of course it is. It always has. Warm periods are historically periods of abundance. Why are we the first humans in history to be afraid of a warming climate? And why are we throwing away so much money in a panic?
Across the world, public finances are stretched dangerously thin. Per person growth continues dropping while costs are climbing for pensions, education, healthcare and defence. These urgent priorities could easily require an additional 3-6 per cent of GDP. Yet green campaigners are loudly calling for governments to spend up to 25 per cent of our GDP choking growth in the name of climate change.
Just to put that figure into perspective, it’s 22 trillion dollars. That’s three times the current US debt, already the largest in history, higher even than in WWII.
But, the Cultists will shriek, the cost of not doing anything is even worse. But is it?
Two major scientific estimates of the total global cost of climate change have been published recently. These are not individual studies, which can vary (with the costliest studies getting copious press coverage).
Instead, they are meta-studies based on the entirety of the peer-reviewed literature.
One is authored by one of the most cited climate economists, Richard Tol; the other is by the only climate economist to win the Nobel prize, William Nordhaus.
The studies suggest that a 3C temperature increase by the end of the century – slightly pessimistic based on current trends – will have a global cost equivalent to between 1.9 per cent and 3.1 per cent of global GDP.
That is, as little as a 10th of what the Cultists want us to spend trying (almost certainly in vain) to stop it. Does that sound remotely sane to you?
Bear in mind that the humans in the globally warmed future will, even the UN estimates, be vastly wealthier than humans today. In fact, 450 per cent wealthier. If we ‘allow’ climate change to continue ‘unchecked’, then they’ll only be 440 per cent richer. So, the Cult want us to beggar ourselves today, so the future can be 10 per cent richer. Imagine asking a peasant in 1900 to sacrifice a quarter of the pittance they had, just so their great-grandchildren could be 10 per cent wealthier, a century later.
Imagine asking them to go hungry, so we could be fractionally more fed in 100 years. If temperatures increase by a ‘dangerous’ 3°C, there’ll only be 49 per cent more food available in 2100, instead of 51 per cent.
Or weather disasters: they killed half a million people annually in the 1920s, whereas the last decade saw fewer than 9000 fatalities each year.
The 97.5 per cent reduction in mortality is because people are more resilient when they’re richer and can access better technology.
Meanwhile, the world’s single biggest polluter, China, gets of scot-free. Xi must be laughing his head off at our lunatic elite class.
More responsible politicians “only” want to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. But this approach still means slowing growth in the name of climate change, by forcing businesses and individuals to use less-efficient green energy instead of fossil fuels.
The total costs would be enormous, between $15 trillion and $37 trillion each year throughout the century, equivalent to 15-37 per cent of global GDP today.
Given wealthier OECD countries will foot most of this bill, the price tag will be the equivalent to each person in the rich world paying north of $10,000 every year.
Not only will this be politically impossible, but the benefit will be a far smaller 1 per cent of GDP across the century.
Our ancestors would rightly tell us to go fuck ourselves. Our descendants will rightly judge us to be barking mad.
