In the Epoch Times Stephen Moore of the Heritage Foundation writes “Environmental scholar Bjorn Lomborg recently calculated that across the globe, governments have spent at least $16 trillion feeding the climate change industrial complex. And for what?” A splendid question. Of course some people would say “Well, to keep the sky from catching fire, duh”. But since the reduction in emissions has been trivial, it wasn’t a great bargain. Plus, Moore being an actual economist, he drills in on the key point: “But it’s much worse than that. In economics, there is a concept called opportunity cost: What could we have done with $16 trillion to make the world better off?” So, after carving “Opportunity cost” over the entrance to our academy, we ask anyone who enters to suppose that you are a do-gooder, and a green one at that. And suppose that someone had offered you sixteen trillion bucks back in 1995 to do good with. Whatever you wanted. Malnutrition in Africa. Plastic in the oceans. Loss of habitat. Safe drinking water for people in South Asia or even on Canadian aboriginal reserves. Literally anything. What could you have accomplished, or at least attempted? This question was long ago posed by Lomborg, albeit only with $75 billion imaginary dollars, to a panel of experts who concluded climate change was far down the list of spending targets. And yet governments said no thanks and spend all $16 trillion fighting “carbon pollution”. And for what?
In their defence those same governments might be tempted to point to the lack of warming and say something like “See, it worked! Sure, $16 trillion is a lot but we saved Earth from runaway heating so be grateful.” However they are also the ones who lament that the planet continues to warm, heat, bake and boil. So even if they’re right, they’re wrong. And either way, the money really was all wasted.
Of course they might say no, see, it would have been way worse without that spending. And as we’ve noted before, one of the many slippery things about climate alarmism is just how fast they think changes in CO2 produces changes in temperature and via changes in temperature, changes in weather. It’s very difficult to pin them down on just when the really troubling impacts began to be palpable, not least because they generally say we’re already in a climate crisis that’s about to hit. But even the models, and here we include hysterical ones like RCP8.5, do not generally suggest that the temperature today would be a whole lot higher if we’d stayed on the emissions track from 1995 instead of, well, staying on it, with Western nations declining due to increasing energy efficiency not political grandstanding and China, India and others more than taking up the slack.
To be fair, it would not be illogical for such persons to say, or shriek, that it proves $16 trillion was just peanuts, we should have spent $160 trillion or $48 quadrillion or 4 Triganic Pus or something of that sort. And they did.
For instance, just over two years ago Bloomberg actually ran a column saying $266 Trillion in Climate Spending is a No-Brainer”. And we agreed, sardonically, since the whole world GDP seems to be around $96 trillion as nearly as anyone can estimate it. (We are not convinced most alarmists who toss such numbers around, like former Canadian Environment Minister Catherine McKenna who wanted “trillions in infrastructure investments from both governments and the private sector”, can tell you off the cuff to within an order of magnitude what, say, the current US or Canadian GDP is.)
That Bloomberg column cited a Climate Policy Institute study that somehow estimated that $8.6 trillion would be, as the author with a BA in journalism put it:
“necessary every year between now and 2030, ramping up to $10 trillion annually through 2050, if we’re to limit global heating to 1.5C above pre-industrial averages and cope with the climate chaos already taking place.”
So the idea would be to spend $16 trillion more every two years starting in 2024, so we’d already have done it and be roaring toward $20 trillion total, while planning to get through hundreds of trillions more by 2050, all to fail to achieve something symbolic. (Indeed Phil Jones of the infamous Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia said in 2007 that the then-crucial limit of 2°C was “pulled out of thin air”. As for 1.5, it was conjured up by politicians at COP21 in Paris without even a pretence of science.)
So we challenge your typical well-meaning do-gooder today, refraining from the impulse to stereotype them as wearing sandals, drinking oat milk or anything else: if instead of that $16 trillion 30 years ago, someone offered you $160 trillion to spend between now and 2040 on whatever ails humanity, how much would you devote to fighting the dreaded climate change troll? And remember, it’s not “as well as” whatever else you’d like to lavish other people’s cash on. It’s “instead of”.
Clearly the climate change industrial complex is the biggest Ponzi Scheme of all time!And that 16 trillion dollars,or whatever the amount is has lined relatively few,but very wealthy pockets.Shame!