https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/508762-joe-biden-bets-on-net-zero
“Science tells us we have nine years before the damage is irreversible,” Joe Biden declared last week, echoing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-N.Y.) claim 18 months ago that the world would end in 12 years unless climate change was addressed. Pledging “drastic action,” the Democrats’ presumptive presidential nominee says he’ll spend $1.7 trillion so that the United States can cut net greenhouse-gas emissions to zero by 2050.
Biden’s and Ocasio-Cortez’s doomsday remarks both refer to the 2018 special report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on the impact of global warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. That report can now be seen as the most successful bait-and-switch of the 21st century.
In 2015, many national governments, including the United States under the Obama administration, signed on to the Paris Agreement and its aim of “pursuing efforts” to limit the rise in global temperature to 1.5°C and to reach “net zero” – a balance between greenhouse-gas emissions produced and emissions taken out of the atmosphere – sometime in the second half of the century. Three years later, the IPCC produced its 2018 report, bringing forward the net-zero deadline to 2050. At the same time, it declared that greenhouse-gas emissions must be cut by 40 percent by 2030, thereby setting in motion the doomsday timetable touted by climate alarmists.
The science in the report is pretty crude. In essence, the IPCC concluded that the climate impacts of limiting global warming to a 2°C rise are greater than a 1.5°C rise. That’s hardly rocket science, or even climate science. Far more important is what the IPCC did and didn’t do. It didn’t look at the costs of working toward net zero and weigh them against the putative climate benefits. In fact, it barely looked at the costs of net zero at all.
