The Paris Accords As “Climate Insurance”—Unaffordable and Unnecessary

I started covering this absurd topic twenty years ago.  I never imagined that this MEME would still be pushed on us today.

The nastiest conceit is that human industrial activity can serve to actually shift our climate.  We cannot even approach the necessary level of impact and the natural rise in CO2 that we have sort6t of measured tracks a post glaciation rebound.

now do understand that Terraforming Terra to eliminate all deserts will produce a temperately more moderated earth with a reduction in heat loss and a massive absorption of CO2 by our biome.  It will never collapse our southern ice cap.

This will likely still take us a thousand years and a population of 100,000,000,000.

Understand that this is an artificial transfer of spending power at the expense of the developed world and the USA in particular without obvious reciprocity.  We do need better accomadations but this one is absurd to start with.  Rather like extracting gold from India in the nineteenth century if they ever really did..

The Paris Accords As “Climate Insurance”—Unaffordable and Unnecessary

Dec. 15, 2024 9:00 pm348 Comments

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/12/paris-accords-as-climate-insurance-unaffordable-unnecessary/

This story originally was published by Real Clear Wire

By Steven E. Koonin and Mark P. Mills

Real Clear Wire

[The following is based on remarks delivered by Koonin and Mills at an MIT Free Speech Alliancedebate, which can be viewed here.]

The climate change debate continues to rage. Though the science remains “unsettled,” what does seem settled is that President Trump will withdraw, again, from the now infamous Paris Climate Accords. Importantly, those accords are centered on pledges made to modify national energy policies.

A decision to exit the Paris Accords is no mere gesture. The central fact for citizens everywhere is that putative “climate solutions” would deploy trillions of dollars and implement mandates and diktats for the supply and use of energy in every aspect of society.

The stated rationale for proposals to alter completely how civilization is fueled is the need for an “insurance policy” against future climate catastrophes. In that framing, the climate-fearful argue that some possibility of consequential future harms warrants the “responsible” decision to “buy” insurance now. But this often-argued “insurance” construct assumes that we know enough to say that the consequences of future climate change justify paying for the insurance—and collaterally, that we know the “insurance” itself will be affordable.

It turns out that we do know quite a bit about both those domains. As we outline below, reality tells us that the climate-change consequences that we’re trying to avoid will be modest—and that the costs of the “insurance” are staggering.

What are we insuring against?

The proposition of paying for “climate insurance” requires that we first consider the “benefits” of 50-year decarbonization, a timescale that comes from the Paris goal of limiting global average temperature rise to 2oC. We can then turn to weighing those benefits against the cost of achieving so-called “net zero” greenhouse gas emissions. That comparison is complicated, not least because of the uncertainties on the impacts allegedly avoided by reducing human influences on the climate. There’s also the issue of “costs and benefits to whom,” as well as the question of whether there is in fact urgency to reduce emissions.

There are three points to make: the timescale for emissions reduction is arbitrary; the climate “threat” is far from dire; and the cost/benefit calculus very much depends on who is doing the calculation.

Start with the Paris goal itself, which seeks to keep the rise in average global surface temperature to less than 2oC, which the climate modelers say would require net zero global emissions in the latter half of this century. Meanwhile, emissions are continuing to rise and will again reach an all-time high this year. The subtitles of the UN’s annual Emission Gap Report give a flavor of the lack of progress: in 2023 it was a “Broken record . . . Temperatures hit new highs, yet world fails to cut emissions (again)”, and this year it was “No more hot air, please.” But even that 2oC is not a hard limit. When Hans Schellnhuber, the so-called “father of the two-degree limit,” was once asked why he gave that number, he responded that it was about right, and it was an easy number for politicians to remember. There is no credible case to make that all manner of chaos will suddenly break out if the temperature rises two, or even three, degrees.

Next is the question of whether the climate threat is so dire that it requires precipitous and Promethean actions—transforming the entire world’s energy system in a few decades. The answer to that question is not as uncertain as the doomsayers claim. There is some guidance from recent history, since the globe has warmed 1.3oC in the past 120 years and about the same amount of warming is expected over the next century. Rather than catastrophe, humanity has seen unprecedented prosperity over that period: the global average lifespan has gone from 32 years to 72 years, per capita GDP has increased sevenfold, the literacy rate has soared, and the death rate from extreme weather events has decreased by a factor of 50! So, it’s hard to believe that a comparable warming over the next century will significantly derail such progress. In fact, the consensus of economic impact studies, as published last year by the Biden White House, is that there would be a few-percent decrement in the GDP for a few degrees of warming. That’s “in the noise,” as we physicists say. Of course, there will be differential impacts, there are uncertainties, and GDP isn’t the only measure of wellbeing. Nevertheless, predictions of catastrophe are not credible.

If you listen to the popular media, you might believe that we humans have already broken the climate. Yet even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) can’t find any climatically significant trends in most climate impact drivers, let alone attribute them to human influences. Losses from extreme weather events are in fact declining as a percentage of GDP as the world becomes more resilient. And projections of the magnitude of future warming have decreased as the IPCC refines its models and the world emits somewhat less CO2 than had been expected because of both slower growth and a shift to carbon-light energy sources.

Finally, there’s the question of “worth it to whom.” While the 1.5 billion of us in the developed world have adequate energy, most of the world craves far more. The inequalities are astounding. Nigerian per capita energy consumption is 30 times smaller than that in the U.S., and some 3 billion people use less electricity each year than is consumed by an average U.S. refrigerator. Fossil fuels are the most effective way of providing the reliable and affordable energy those folks need to improve their lot, so any restraints on those fuels immorally hinders their development. In short, decarbonization is an unaffordable luxury for most people. They face many more immediate, tangible, and soluble problems than the risk of some future climate impacts, the latter best summarized as “we don’t know what, we don’t know when, and we don’t know how severe.”

Urging, cajoling, and requiring the developing world to forswear fossil fuels, as the World Bank and other financiers have been doing, is directly contrary to human flourishing. It’s like telling a starving person, “Don’t eat that steak because it might raise your cholesterol.”

One common objection to this argument is that decarbonization has other benefits—for example, reducing local air pollution. But consider the case of China, where life expectancy increased by 10 years from 1980 to 2020, even as fossil-fuel use increased by 700 percent. (Some of that owes to the reduction in indoor pollution due to cleaner cooking fuels like LPG, a fossil fuel.) Even the dirty Chinese coal plants had great benefits, since increased energy availability was much more important to most Chinese than cleaner air.

Finally, in accounting for global costs and benefits, one also must include the benefits of rising CO2levels—as hard as that may be for some to believe. One benefit: deaths from extreme temperatureshave decreased in recent decades, since roughly 10 times as many people die from extreme cold events (which are declining) than from heat waves (which are increasing modestly). Another benefit is that the earth has significantly “greened”—by one measure, the earth is 40 percent greener than it was 40 years ago. This trend has also helped agricultural productivity to soar, since plants “eat” CO2.

The bottom line is that most scientists know, and an increasing number are finally willing to (bravely) acknowledge publicly, that there is no climate emergency or climate crisis. Hence there is no need for the precipitous and universal decarbonization called for by the Paris Accords. That kind of energy transition will be (in fact, already is) disruptive and expensive. In fact, most in the emerging world are saying, understandably, “We won’t do it unless you pay us for it.” And we in the developed world don’t have the money required to do that.