Slowing economic growth to reduce climate change may therefore do more harm than good. Richard Tol, one of the worlds top climate economists, gives the straight talk on climate. Climate around the year 2075 would make the average person feel as if she had lost 0.2 to 2.0 percent of her income. In other words, a century worth of climate change is about as bad as losing a year of economic growth. If we “spend” the equivalent of a decade of growth or more trying to mitigate climate change, we will not have spent wisely. And here on the worlds poor: A fifth of official development aid is now diverted to climate policy. Money that used to be spent on strengthening the rule of law, better education for girls, and improved health care, for instance, is now used to plug methane leaks and destroy hydrofluorocarbons. Some donors no longer support the use of coal, by far the cheapest way to generate electricity. Instead, poor people are offered intermittent wind power and biomass energy, which drives up the price of food. But the self-satisfaction environmentalists derive from these programs does not put food on poor peoples’ tables. Worth reading the full piece. As he concludes: Common sense is sometimes hard to find in the climate debate. Desmond Tutu recently compared climate change to apartheid. Climate experts Michael Mann and Daniel Kammen compared it to the “gathering storm” of Nazism in Europe before World War II. That sort of nonsense just gets in the way of a rational discussion about what climate policy we should pursue, and how vigorously we should pursue it. the-american-interest/2014/12/10/hot-stuff-cold-logic/
Posted on: Thu, 25 Dec 2014 13:27:01 +0000
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