Killing the Poor to Save the Planet

Dr. Bjorn Lomborg and I co-wrote the article we are jointly about to present to you recently for the UK newspaper The Telegraph, where it was also published in print and online. Dr. Lomborg, who runs a think tank in Denmark known as The Copenhagen Consensus, is, in my estimation, the most reliable commentator on the environmental stewardship front in the world. He and his compatriots are responsible for most of the ideas in this piece.

But first, a bit of an introduction: What is environmental stewardship? It is a set of conceptions and actions based on the idea that human beings are part of the natural world, not beings foreign to it, and that we have a responsibility to ensure that our short-term activities do not compromise our futures by, for example, compromising the viability of the natural systems we all depend upon.

But Dr. Lomborg is no careless activist. Quite the contrary, he has done more than anyone else to examine the multitude of problems that confront us on the environmental front, while simultaneously taking into account economic necessity, the moral and practical responsibility we have to provide people with, for example, education, opportunity, and security. Dr. Lomborg and the experts in his group have conducted very careful cost-benefit analyses of a number of projects deemed by a variety of global leaders to be in the world's best interest, and they have rank-ordered such approaches by return on investment.

In other words, they have attempted to determine where we might spend our money on improving the lot of the poor, to take a prime example, and do the most good in the most efficient manner possible. That efficiency, far from being a mere practical and cold-hearted consideration, is precisely what increases the chances that any good at all will actually be done, which is a very difficult thing to manage. That simultaneously allows us to do more good as we can serve more resources to do so.

The requirement for such an analysis seems self-evident, although it is rarely done. The utility of all spending needs to be assessed, regardless of amount, and that is particularly true when billions or even trillions of dollars are at stake, and the fate of the very economies that sustain us hangs in the balance. We are all confronted with a constant story about the catastrophe that faces the planet, particularly on the carbon front.

It is simpler and, in some sense, more immediately morally rewarding to reduce the complexity of planetary management to the need to reduce our so-called carbon footprint. But the plain truth of the matter is that a multitude of troubles beset us both economically and environmentally. We therefore require people like Dr. Lomborg to think about many issues simultaneously, to produce a plan, and to help us move forward in the most beneficial manner possible.

I would recommend that those of you who are truly interested in such things familiarize yourselves with his work. You could start with "The Smartest Targets in the World," which is a summary of The Copenhagen Consensus think tank’s attempt to prioritize our action and attention in the world on the economic and environmental front. With that, we'll turn our attention to the aforementioned Telegraph article and discuss how those who hypothetically lead us are failing to save the planet at this year's U.N. climate change conference, known as COP27.

Why 27? Because this is literally the 27th time that such a group has been convened. As you will soon see or hear, very little has been accomplished, and much time and money wasted in consequence. "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." This famous quote, often misattributed to Albert Einstein, might very well become the unofficial motto of the U.N. climate change conference in Egypt—the 27th session of the Conference of Parties, so-called COP27.

Global carbon dioxide emissions have kept increasing since the world's nations first committed to rein in climate change at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Despite dozens of climate summits and the global climate agreements struck in Kyoto and Paris, this is the case once again in 2022, when we will collectively set a new emissions record. While rich countries increasingly promise draconian cuts, they then generally backtrack as they import huge amounts of oil, gas, and coal to save their citizens from energy poverty, as they have done most recently to address the current energy crisis.

Most of the future emissions will come from the currently poorer countries in Asia and Africa as they power their climb out of abject poverty. In the previous 10 years, the world has focused more on remediating climate change than ever before. Despite this, we're not achieving anything, although no shortage of money has been wasted. A surprisingly honest review of climate policies by the U.N. revealed a lost decade. The report found that it couldn't tell the difference between what has happened and a world that adopted no new climate policies since 2005.

Consider that all those climate summits and grandiose promises—all that expense and trouble—no measurable difference whatsoever. This state of affairs is unsurprising, unfortunately, because today's renewable energy sources have two big problems. First, they occupy a vast amount of space, often displacing nature. Replacing a square yard of gas-fired power plant requires 73 square yards of solar panels, 239 square yards of unsure wind turbines, or an astonishing 6,000 square yards of biomass.

One study found that the United States would have to devote a land area four times the size of the United Kingdom to clean power to fulfill President Biden's promise of a carbon-free economy by 2050. Second, and of even greater importance, the two renewable energy technologies favored by the vast majority of environmental activists are intermittent or unreliable. Solar energy simply isn't produced when it's overcast or nighttime; wind energy requires a breeze.

We're often told by green energy boosters that wind and solar energy are cheaper than fossil fuels. At best, that is only true when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining. On a windless, dark night, the cost of wind and solar power rises to the infinite. It is for such reasons that it is deeply misleading, although highly convenient, to compare the energy costs of wind or solar to fossil fuels only when it is windy or sunny.

It is also important to note that since all solar energy is sold at essentially the same time—when the sun is up and shining—its value drops dramatically when solar reaches 30 percent market share. In California, for example, as one study revealed, it loses two-thirds of its value. Furthermore, because modern societies require 24 hours of non-stop power, backup is not optional, and that means reliance on fossil fuels when there's no sun.

As more solar and wind are introduced, more fossil fuel backups become ever more expensive as they offer their services for fewer hours to produce the necessary return on capital. Currently, we have battery storage with a capacity to store just one minute and 15 seconds of the world's electricity consumption. That problem will not be ameliorated soon; even by 2030, global batteries will only cover less than 11 minutes of global electricity consumption.

All of this just shows the problems with moving electricity away from fossil fuel. When Biden promises ambitiously that all of America's electricity will come from renewable sources by 2035, he is addressing the comparatively simple part of the climate challenge. Electricity constitutes just 19 percent of total energy use. We're far further behind in developing solutions for agriculture, manufacturing, construction, and transportation.

The latter, transportation, is most often discussed by environmentalists and virtue-signaling politicians who insist that the solution is already at hand: electric vehicles. Despite massive subsidies, however, just 1.4 percent of cars globally are electric, and that number is not rising quickly. The Biden Administration itself estimates that battery electric cars will make up less than 10 percent of total U.S. automobile stock by 2050. The scenario for the entire world is that less than one-fifth of all global cars will be battery electric by 2050.

We should remember as well that we simply do not yet have electric tractors, heavy trucks, airplanes, or ships. That means that all the fossil fuel infrastructure that allows such machinery to operate will have to stay intact for our supply chains to continue their current necessary operations. Our turbocharged electric cars will produce very little impact on the climate.

The International Energy Agency estimates that the world would produce 235 million fewer tons of carbon dioxide if we achieve all our ambitious stated transport electrification targets in this decade. The reduction will lower global temperatures by one ten-thousandth of a degree Celsius by the end of the century, according to the U.N.'s own climate panel's model. Tackling climate change with current technology is essentially impossible.

This means that climate policymakers tinker at the margins, offering deceptive solutions and moral grandstanding. This pattern has been repeated for three decades. Most of the promises made in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and in Kyoto in 1997 were disregarded. A 2018 study found that only 17 of the 157 countries that pledged emission cuts in the Paris Agreement passed laws mandating the required action.

Which nations? Algeria, Canada, Costa Rica, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Indonesia, Japan, North Macedonia, Malaysia, Mexico, Montenegro, Norway, Papua New Guinea, Peru, Samoa, Singapore, and Tonga. These are not the nations that will change global emissions. Even if every country did everything promised in the original Paris Agreement, the emission cuts by 2030 would constitute just one percent of what is necessary to keep temperatures rising under the two-degree target.

Failure, however, has not made politicians or the people they serve more careful or more adamant about searching for better solutions. Instead, they have doubled down, making ever more ludicrous but emotionally attractive pledges despite zero chance of either their implementation or their success if implemented.

Attempting to put forward the much-heralded and oft-trumpeted vision of a zero carbon dioxide emission world, whether by 2035 or 2050, would be so ruinously expensive that extensive-style riots, the kind we saw in Paris, are certain long before the goal is reached. The New Zealand government promised carbon neutrality by 2050. They then commissioned a report to estimate the cost of doing so—a sequence of affairs that should perhaps have been reversed.

The results, even if implemented efficiently, indicate that by 2050 it will cost 16 percent of total annual gross domestic product, a figure higher than that of the entire current annual national budget. That cost will be incurred every year. That's nothing but a pathway to less prosperity, and treading down such a pathway will produce a host of secondary consequences, including serious civil unrest that will not be in the least beneficial to the planet.

The renowned scientific journal Nature recently published a study indicating that getting 80 percent of the way to Biden's promised climate utopia by mid-century would cost every American more than five thousand dollars per year. The same Americans who are willing to pay only a fraction of that—about 177 dollars per year, according to research published by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication in the journal Environmental Research Letters. Getting to a hundred percent would more than double that cost.

It's no surprise that hypothetically green-minded politicians exhibit little enthusiasm for investigating the true cost of their preposterous and self-serving promises. If we do care about fixing this challenge, we need to change course. Pretending that the proper technological answer currently exists and it's not being implemented because we lack conviction and willpower is reckless and misleading.

Worse, it stops us from pursuing real solutions to the many problems that confront us, only one of which is climate change. Dozens of the world's top climate economists and three Nobel laureates in economics recently evaluated a whole gamut of climate solutions for the think tank Copenhagen Consensus. Continuing to do what the EU has been doing—cutting carbon emissions with a mix of market and planning dictates—means spending one pound to avoid a mere three pence of long-term climate damage.

That's partly because cutting CO2 output in the rich and already efficient producing EU is impractically expensive, and partly because EU climate policies are much more inefficient than necessary. The EU prefers to use solar and wind, for example, to cut a ton of CO2 over the more efficient option of switching from coal to natural gas. The Nobel laureates and climate economists instead determined that investment in green energy innovation comprises the best long-term investment.

Why? Consider how the world worried over starvation in the 1960s and '70s. If we had approached that problem like we're approaching climate remediation, we would have required the rich to eat less while serving their leftovers to the poor. That would have failed, as our current approaches will fail disastrously. What worked instead? The Green Revolution—the innovative development of high-yielding crops.

We thereby increased world grain production by 250 percent between 1950 and 1984, raising the calorie intake of the world's poorest people and reducing the incidence of serious famines. Innovative thinkers tackled the problem head on instead of tinkering around the edges. Innovation meant producing more with less, instead of requiring people to make do with less.

Even genuinely looming catastrophes have been continually pushed aside throughout human history because of innovation and technological development. It's innovation that gave us security and prosperity, and that continues to drive the growth and the increased efficiency of the world's largest economies. In general, unfortunately, investment in long-term innovation is underfunded because it is hard for private investors to capture benefits in areas where long-term innovation can be underfunded due to the difficulties in monetizing benefits in a sufficiently short time frame. Public investment and support are often warranted.

A recent example, and a stellar success on the climate innovation front, is the 10-year, 10 billion dollar U.S. public investment in shale gas, which originated under President George W. Bush. Remarkably, this endeavor was not planned as part of the policy of climate change remediation. Nonetheless, it led the way for a production surge, with all the attended economic benefits, particularly for the poor, that allowed natural gas to become cheaper than the dirtier coal it partially replaced. Energy derived from natural gas produces approximately half the carbon dioxide of coal.

The consequence? The U.S. has the best record of carbon dioxide emission reduction of any country in the past decade and simultaneously reduced its reliance on foreign suppliers of uncertain reliability and cost. Everyone in principle agrees that we should be spending much more on R&D. However, the fraction of rich countries' GDP actually invested into green R&D has halved since the 1980s.

Why? Putting up inefficient solar panels and wind turbines offers the opportunity for good photo ops and allows those who lead to convince us of their dedication to action, while funding researchers requires a more subtle and mature understanding and approach. We might remember, however, when considering such things, that our economic stability and opportunity is now at the risk of theory, and we are simultaneously not currently doing the planet any favors.

According to the Copenhagen Consensus Nobel laureates, we should increase our current spending five-fold to 100 billion dollars per year. This doesn't mean that in total we should be spending more; we already devote 600 billion dollars per year to finance ineffective climate remediation strategies. We could instead take a mere sixth of that poorly spent money and direct it towards the most effective means of addressing our problems.

World leaders on the sidelines in Paris in 2015 drew a billionaire philanthropist and promised to double green energy R&D over a five-year period. The so-called Mission Innovation did not materialize. Spending as a percentage of GDP hardly moved since then. A genuine innovation-led response would require the consideration of multiple solutions. We could improve today's technologies rather than erecting currently inefficient turbines and solar panels.

We could devote more attention to nuclear fission, perhaps in the form of modular reactors, and continue to explore fusion, hydrogen generation from water, and more. The geneticist who spearheaded the development of the first draft sequence of the human genome—a technological tour de force—completed far earlier and at less cost than originally estimated, makes a strong case for research into algae that produces oil grown on the ocean surface.

Such algae simply converts sunlight and carbon dioxide to oil when producing it; burning it would yield carbon dioxide-free oil. Algae are far from cost-effective now, but researching this and many other solutions is not only inexpensive but offers our best opportunity to find real breakthrough technologies. If we innovate the price of green energy down below fossil fuels, everyone will switch.

This would be a far better solution, particularly for the poor, than increasing the cost of fossil fuels to the point of general penury to disincentivize use. The Copenhagen Consensus experts calculated returns from green energy R&D at 11 pounds for every pound invested—hundreds of times more effective than current climate policies.

Finding the breakthroughs that will power the rest of the 21st century could require a decade, or it could take four, but no other genuine solutions beckon, and we've already had three decades of spectacular failure pursuing the policies that are currently in place. We know that the world leaders gathered at COP27 won't solve the problem; that passage with the same empty promises offered 26 times previously.

Are we going to do the same thing yet again? Remember the definition of insanity? But innovation beckons, as it has so reliably in the past. We have better options, and ignoring them comes at the cost of our economy, our opportunity, and the environment.