The high cost of climate alarmism

By Conrad Black

The premier defector from, and debunker of, the “Green Terror,” which holds that climate change is an existential challenge to the continuation of life on earth, is probably Bjorn Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Consensus Centre and former director of the Danish government’s Environmental Assessment Institute. He has been a prominent climate change skeptic for years, and has roiled the waters by pointing out the mistaken warnings of climate alarmists. Many of them predicted the onset of unlivable circumstances in much of the world long before now, as a result of unrestrained carbon use.

His latest controversial contribution to the subject came earlier this month, when he explained that at least $16 trillion has been spent in the last 20 years on the green transition. Citing this fact, American columnist and economist Stephen Moore argued that not a single life has been, or will be, saved by what he called “this shameful and colossal misallocation of human resources.” Moore also claims that countless lives in relatively underdeveloped countries have been squandered or shortened by the withholding of affordable energy.

In the propagation of his alarmist views on the climate, former U.S. vice-president Al Gore produced a film called “An Inconvenient Truth.” The real inconvenient truth is that while those who have catered to the climate panic have made a great deal of money from it, there has not been one penny of measurable payoff for society, civilization or anyone except the profiteers from this faddish and insane wild goose chase. Moore argued that U.S. President Donald Trump’s repeal of taxes on carbon dioxide emissions will turn out to be his most successful pro-growth policy. Moore describes this as “the mother of all costly regulations,” which he believes has cost over $1 trillion.

Moore lamented our inability to “recapture the $16 trillion wasted on a false crisis. Sunk costs are, alas, sunk.” He suggested that, “The people at the Sierra Club, the Environmental Defense Fund and the United Nations, and politicians like Al Gore, Joe Biden and John Kerry who voted for and carried out this Green New Deal scam, should be placed on a wall of shame.” He described the $400 billion spent by the Biden administration on green energy as an outright “sham.”

Moore’s assault did not stop with decrying the waste of the $16 trillion that has enriched the redundant climate change industry; there is also the painful matter of the opportunity cost. This requires speculation on what the world could have done with the $16 trillion wasted on this chimera if it had been sensibly applied to the legitimate needs of the world’s most disadvantaged people. He speculated on how the quality of drinking water in poorer countries could have been improved, and how many avoidable deaths from diseases, such as malaria, that ravage poor countries could have been prevented, or how illiteracy could have been combated by building and staffing schools in poor areas. These and many other alternative subjects of official attention could have bettered the lot of many millions of people, and this too should be taken into account in assessing the performance of the West’s climate obsession.

In Canada, we have a new prime minister who for many years has been steeped to the eyeballs in what can only reasonably be described as climate hysteria. He transformed the Bank of England into an agency that, when it was not terrorizing the British public into thinking that it would begin an inexorable descent backwards to a Stone Age economy if Britain departed Europe, constantly announced that all mankind courted species destruction if it did not swear off fossil fuels, as if they were a lethal mass poison. (None of this had anything to do with central banking.) There is some circumstantial evidence that political realities, both public opinion polls and the less than unshakable enthusiasm in Alberta for the federal war on oil, have caused Carney to reconsider climate change. All those concerned with Canada’s national interest must hope ardently, and if so minded, address the divine intelligence in the manner of their choice in support of a rapid and constructive evolution of the prime minister’s views on this subject.

It is not sufficient to finesse and obfuscate and make gestures of solidarity in all directions; the federal Liberal caucus is infested with climate fanatics and unless a comprehensive course correction is believably announced by the prime minister, that party cannot be trusted not to relapse into the passion of economic suicide that has possessed it since former Liberal leader Stéphane Dion’s Green Shift in 2008. He was proud of the Kyoto agreement under which we would pay mountainous Danegeld to underdeveloped countries for their virtue in having an economy so backward that fossil fuel use was restrained. (Dion is, in other ways, an estimable public servant but he was guilty of cruelty to animals in naming the family dog “Kyoto.”) Climate hysteria has already caused us to tumble badly in comparative national per capita income (now barely 65 per cent of the United States). We have to emancipate ourselves from this nonsense before we become a poorhouse from sea to sea.

First published in the National Post