The Cost Of The Climate Cabal
A year ago while in Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum, the administration’s climate functionary John Kerry said that “money, money, money, money, money, money, money” was needed for climate programs. That string of words actually corresponds with a sum, and it’s $150 trillion.
Go ahead, try to comprehend that number. It’s about 51/2 times the size of the U.S. economy, more than four times larger than the (always-growing) federal debt, and 150% of the world’s GDP. Or, according to Eric Worrall at the Watts Up With That? climate site, “if you spent $130 million every day since the death of Jesus Christ, just about now you would be approaching $100 trillion.”
That it will be spent over the next 26 years doesn’t mean that it’s not a significant, and economy-breaking, amount.
The immense size of the “need” matters little to the Davos crony crowd, which will meet for the 54th time next week. The gathering of the rich and powerful will spend its week schmoozing, trading favors and backslapping to become richer and more powerful. And of course talking about how much the world needs them and their special skills to solve the climate crisis they have fabricated, and how much of other people’s money they need to get the job done.
But let’s say the climate cabal gets the $150 trillion (after all, it’s only about $5 trillion a year) from taxpayers. What can we expect in return?
Economic struggles. Energy shortages. And zero impact on the climate.
“You can turn out the lights and shut down the cars and oil fields and you won’t affect the weather, because, if you believe humans are causing dangerous climate change, which I don’t, developing countries, led by China and India, are presently driving the bus,” says H. Sterling Burnett, director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy.
“In the end, the only true effect (President Joe) Biden’s climate efforts will have on Americans is to make their supply of electric power more expensive and less reliable, to make travel more difficult and expensive, and cost jobs and lives.”
Research by University of Sussex economist Richard S.J. Tol, whose other academic and institutional affiliations are too numerous to list here, found that reaching previously agreed upon climate targets can’t withstand a cost-benefit analysis.
“In 2050, the year of net-zero, the best estimate of the benefits of the 1.5∘C target are about 0.5% of GDP while the costs are almost 5%,” he wrote last year.
He further noted that “the biggest policy challenge lies in dealing with the inevitable fall-out when the 1.5∘C target is missed, perhaps later this decade, and the 2.0∘C becomes undeniably infeasible. The environmental movement will have to come to terms with a catastrophe that was foretold but did not materialize.” (Emphasis our own.)
While we’d be pleased to see the climate alarmists come to terms with its many missed predictions, exaggerations, irresponsible fearmongering, obstructive “protests,” constant streams of nonsense and demands for money, we fear that it will take another generation for rationality to prevail. True believers don’t easily surrender their convictions. Grifters greedily cling to their racket. Politicians don’t amass power just to give it up when it’s shown the facts aren’t on their side. The reasonable among us still have a lot of work to do.
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