Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 341

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet," by Bjorn Lomborg.

I HAVE BEEN part of the global discussion on climate change policy for two decades, since writing The Skeptical Environmentalist. Throughout all this time, I have argued that climate change is a real problem. Contrary to what you hear, the basic climate findings have remained remarkably consistent over the last twenty years. Scientists agree that global warming is mostly caused by humans, and there has been little change in the impacts they project for temperature and sea level rise.

The political reaction to the reality of climate change has always been flawed—this, too, I have been pointing out for decades. There are, I have argued and continue to argue, smarter ways than our present-day approach to tackle global warming. But the conversation around me has changed dramatically in recent years. The rhetoric on climate change has become ever more extreme and less moored to the actual science. 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. 

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. 

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 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. That is why I’m writing this book now. We need to dial back on the panic, look at the science, face the economics, and address the issue rationally. How do we fix climate change, and how do we prioritize it amid the many other problems afflicting the world?

We can draw lessons from the time we transitioned our global economy from one source of light to another. From the 1700s through the mid-1800s, whale oil provided light to the United States and much of the Western world. The US dominated the slaughter of whales, a barbaric practice by today’s standards. At its peak, whaling employed seventy thousand people and was the fifth-largest industry in the United States. Producing millions of gallons of whale oil each year, the industry was widely seen as unassailable, offering a brighter and cleaner-burning option to cheaper, less safe alternatives such as lard oil and camphene. It was hard to imagine that people would ever agree to live without whale oil, because that would have meant going backward toward a sootier, dimmer past.

In those days, of course, there was no environmental movement to speak of. But one wonders if the whalers, finding each year that they needed to go farther from Nantucket Island to kill whales, ever asked themselves: “What will happen when the whales run out?” The Western world was reliant on slaughtering whales for quality lighting, yet we never did hunt whales to extinction. Why? We found alternative technologies. First, kerosene from petroleum replaced whale oil as a source of lighting. And we didn’t run out of kerosene, either: electricity supplanted it because it was a superior way to light our planet. 

Exhortations to stop using whale oil, to turn down the lights, or go back to old, heavily polluting practices were not what saved the whales. New technology did.

RIGHT NOW, FOSSIL FUELS are cheap. The global economy relies on them, and there are currently no alternative energy sources fully able to compete. We should be focusing much more on finding and creating those alternatives. Solar and wind power, so far, are not the answer. Even with huge political support and trillions of dollars in subsidies, solar and wind energy provide just over one percent of our global energy needs. The International Energy Agency estimates that by 2040 and even after another $4 trillion has been spent on additional subsidies, solar and wind power will deliver only less than 5 percent of global energy. They are expensive and inefficient compared to fossil fuels. The cheapness of fossil fuels explains why they meet about 80 percent of our energy needs today, and why they will still be providing 74 percent in 2040, according to the International Energy Agency, even if every promise made by world leaders in the Paris Agreement is delivered.

Reducing our carbon dioxide emissions significantly from fossil fuels will require innovation. The good news is that we have managed to innovate in this area already, almost without trying to. One of the best examples of this in recent times is the evolution of fracking in the United States. Fracking has reduced the price of oil and gas. As we saw in chapter 10, it has lowered the price of heating, allowing poorer people especially to heat their homes better, saving about eleven thousand lives each year. It has also dramatically increased the wealth of the United States—a 2019 study shows that it has increased US GDP by one percent over what it would otherwise have been in 2015, adding $180 billion to the US economy each year.

It has also had real, negative impacts on the environment, especially through air pollution, water pollution, and habitat fragmentation. The biggest study, published in 2019, estimates the total environmental cost of US fracking at $23 billion per year, with air pollution making up three-quarters of that cost. While overall, fracking very likely delivers an overwhelming benefit to the United States, the political conversation for and against it can be seen as a discussion on the distribution of these benefits and costs.

Here, though, we can think about fracking as an example of innovation to cut carbon dioxide emissions. The technology of fracking has been around since at least 1947, but it took public resources to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars in innovation support from the US Department of Energy and perhaps $10 billion in production tax credits for private entrepreneurs to find ways to innovate procedures to frack gas profitably. 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. Crucially, gas emits about half the carbon dioxide of coal. Making gas cheaper than coal has shifted a large part of US electricity production from coal to gas. 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.

Remember that approximately one-fourth of aid today is diverted to climate aid projects. Indeed, the amount spent on climate aid today could fund all these interventions in contraception, tuberculosis, malaria, immunization, and nutrition—with money to spare. The money spent on climate aid is money we cannot spend twice. Many people deeply committed to addressing climate change also believe in expanding women’s access to contraception, in reducing poverty, and in eliminating disease in the poorest parts of the world. But too often, they forget that there are trade-offs.

Comprehensive studies show that for rich countries, lower growth means higher risks of protests and political breakdown. This is not surprising. If you live in a burgeoning economy, you know that you and your children will be much better off in the coming years and 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.

Politicians who focus on ever-stronger climate policies will not only be likely to spend current resources poorly but also deliver lower and potentially zero growth for the coming decades. This would delight the few job-secure academics who from comfortable ivory towers advocate degrowth for climate, but it would lead to tragic outcomes of stagnation, strife, and discord for ordinary people.