We constantly hear that because climate change is real we should “follow the science” and end fossil fuel use. [emphasis, links added]
We hear it both from politicians who favor swift carbon cuts and from natural scientists themselves, as when the editor-in-chief of Nature insists “The science is clear — fossil fuels must go.”
The assertion is convenient for politicians because it allows them to avoid responsibility for the many costs and downsides of climate policy, painting these as inevitable results of diligently following the scientific evidence.
But it is false. It confounds climate science with climate policy.
Careful climate science is clearly needed to shape thoughtful climate policy. It tells us what the physical impact will be of emitting more or less CO2.
But climate policy, like any policy, should be the democratic outcome of a weighing of benefits and costs. Climate science tells us about some of the benefits of cutting emissions but it tells us nothing of the costs, which instead come from the much less hyped field of climate economics.
The story told by activist politicians and climate campaigners suggests there is nothing but benefit to ending fossil fuels — and a hellscape if nothing is done.
But the reality is that life has improved dramatically in recent centuries largely because of the immense increase in available energy that has come mostly from fossil fuels.
Lifespans have more than doubled, hunger has dramatically declined and incomes have increased ten-fold.
Although the impact of climate change is likely negative it is typically enormously exaggerated.
We constantly hear about extreme weather such as droughts, storms, floods, and fires —although even the UN Climate Panel [IPCC] finds that, for most of these things, evidence of their worsening cannot yet be documented.
But much more importantly, a richer world is much more resilient and hence much less affected by extreme weather.
The data shows that climate-related deaths from droughts, storms, floods, and fires have declined by more than 97 percent over the last century — from nearly 500,000 a year 100 years ago to fewer than 15,000 in the 2020s.
Climate-related disasters have declined 97+% over the century
Richer, smarter and more resilient societies reduce disaster deaths
This swamps any potential climate signal
Why is this not reported?
Instead, media only delivers climate doomhttps://t.co/19j9rlqTMH pic.twitter.com/YsUugy0wRi
— Bjorn Lomborg (@BjornLomborg) January 1, 2024
At the same time, the costs of the climate campaigners’ calls to “just stop” oil, gas, and coal are massively downplayed.
The world currently gets almost four-fifths of all its energy from fossil fuels. If we quickly ended our use of them, billions of people would die.
Four billion people — half the world’s population — depend on food grown with synthetic fertilizer produced almost entirely by natural gas. If we ended fossil fuels quickly, we would have no way to feed these people.
Add the billions who depend on fossil fuels for wintertime heating and steel, cement, plastics, and transport, it is little wonder that one recent estimate shows that abruptly ending fossil fuels would lead to six billion people dying in less than a year.
These vast downsides are not considered within climate science, which understandably focuses on carbon emissions and climate models. But they need to be an integral part of the debate about climate policy.
Most politicians advocate a slightly less rushed end to fossil fuels, phasing them out by 2050. The short-term death toll would be much lower but the downsides are still immense.
The latest peer-reviewed climate-economic research shows that efficiently reaching net-zero emissions by 2050 will cost a staggering US$27 trillion per year on average over this century.
That is one-quarter of the world’s current GDP — per year.
The same research shows that the benefits will be just a small fraction of that cost: the policy is prohibitively expensive and brings little benefit.
A good analogy is to consider the more than one million global traffic deaths annually. Like climate change, traffic is a man-made problem. Like climate change, it is something we could entirely solve.
‘The science’ informs us about the problem but is not the arbiter of solutions. Democracies are.
If scientists were to look only at how to avoid the million traffic deaths, one solution would be to reduce speed limits everywhere to three miles per hour and enforce that strictly. This would almost eliminate traffic deaths. Of course, it would also almost eliminate our economies and our productive lives.
We would laugh if politicians said we should “follow the science” and stop traffic deaths by reducing road speeds to three mph. We should take the same sensible approach to climate policy that we take to traffic policy.
We should focus on short-term adaptation to build resilience and long-term investment in R&D to develop green energy. Innovation must drive the price of reliable green energy down below that of fossil fuels, eventually making sure everyone can switch to low-carbon alternatives.
When politicians tell us they are “following the science,” they use the claim to shut down open discussion of the enormous costs of their policies “The science” informs us about the problem but is not the arbiter of solutions. Democracies are.
Sudden, dramatic cuts in fossil fuel consumption will have huge downsides their backers would rather ignore. Climate change is a problem but a civilization-endangering cure could be far worse than the disease.
Top Image via Instagram/Climate Defiance
Read more at Financial Post
