Today, Drudge briefly headlined a report that about a billion dollars a day are being spent to combat global warming. I searched the headline out and found it plastered all over right-wing websites, so I got a bit suspicious. But, when I clicked through to the original study, I found that it was prepared by an outfit calling itself the Climate Policy Initiative and leads with:
global climate finance flows have plateaued at USD 359 billion, or around USD 1 billion per day â far below even the most conservative estimates of investment needs.
This certainly doesn’t sound like the tone of a denier or someone who thinks the figure is outrageous, nor does the rest of the piece read as any sort of anti-warmist critique. So, I’m content to take the number at face value.
But what’s a billion a day on a planet with 7 billion people? The annual Gross World Product is about 74 trillion dollars (the USA accounts for 22% of that), so a billion a day is half of one percent of global output. Doesn’t sound like a lot when measured that way, nor does it sound like a whole lot when the United States alone is borrowing $4.5 billion a day.
On the other hand, a billion a day could feed a couple hundred million of the poorest, most malnourished people in the world. And it is here that the most insidious and, dare I say, evil aspect of global warmism can be found.
Lets start with an unassailable truth. The climate models created by the experts, the people who are at the fore of climate research, the people who are perpetually cited by those who insist that we are facing catastrophe if we don’t act now, don’t work. They failed to predict the last 17 years of temperatures. Even the true believers have been forced to admit this. Of course, they’ve monday-morning-quarterbacked this discrepancy as either an unexplained “pause” in a long-term trend or as the result of some hitherto un-understood phenomenon such as deep ocean heat sinks. When dealing with something as immensely complicated as global climate science, it’s easy to back-fit theories. But, if they wanted to be honest, they’d say “OK, we have new models, lets see how they work over the next 17 years.” And, along with that, they’d call for a hiatus in anti-anthropogenic-global-warming (anti-AGW) efforts until their new models are verified. If there’s one thing we learned from ClimateGate, honesty and openness aren’t high on the researchers’ priority lists, so it’s no surprise that none of them are calling for a pause in expenditures, carbon-cap mandates, alternative energy subsidies and the like.
There’s a meme starting to gain traction among those who oppose the creep of socialism into our society. It’s a simple three word response to any proposal to expend taxpayer or borrowed money on some do-good effort. It’s the question that statists, socialists, communists and their ilk uncomfortably wave away. It’s the question that they can never adequately address. It’s at what cost?
We in this country and in most first world nations live lives of comfort and ease that are unimaginable to our ancestors and to the poor of third world nations. It’s not a big deal, we’re told, if we have to pay a bit more for our energy, our food, and all the consumer goods that rely on energy and food. It’s OK if our GDP growth is a little lower than it might have been because anti-AGW policies and practices have been implemented. We can take a fractional hit in our comfort and ease to help save the planet. And, because the hit isn’t all that big, it’s OK that the past 17 years dropped a whole lot of uncertainty on the validity of the theory. Apart from the speciousness of this line of reasoning (compound a half percent of GDP over a generation or two and then tell us about how insignificant the loss of living standards is), there is a grotesque selfishness therein.
The people most harmed by actions that reduce the rate of improvement of the world’s living standards, that slow the creation of wealth by bleeding some of it away, that stifle innovation by introducing inefficiencies, are the people who have the most to gain from the continual technological progress created by humans: the desperately poor in third world nations. These are the people who have the most to gain from the progress of human society: healthier and longer lives, more of the basic human comforts we take for granted, and the opportunity to rise out of subsistence living. As capitalism infiltrates and transforms the old communist and socialist states, that opportunity is now available to hundreds of millions to whom it was previously denied. It’s not easy, and there will always be oppressive forces standing in their way, but the opportunity is now better than it has ever been for so many.
Modern life depends on energy. Light, heat, transportation, and productive machinery rely on energy, and the cheaper the energy, the better we live. A farmer with a few pieces of mechanized equipment can produce more than a hundred farmers working by hand. This vast increase in wealth creation is life-transforming, and it isn’t just in farming that this holds true. Productivity in all walks of life benefits from more and cheaper energy, and as productivity improves, living standards improve.
Statists and liberals claim to care about the poor as they spend other people’s money on failed programs. Half a century of War on Poverty in this nation has primarily served to create a permanently dependent underclass, yet they continue to insist that theirs is the way to help the poor of this country. But what of the poor in the third world? Isn’t the harm being done to them by premature (and quixotic, more on that in a moment) efforts to combat an unproven problem something that should abhor those who say they care the most?
The Best-and-Brightest among the global warming alarmists tell us that the world must curtail carbon emissions to avert catastrophe. Yet nations like Russia, China, Brazil and India aren’t going to be throwing giant wet blankets over their economies (and stifling the rise out of poverty of their people) by rationing carbon emissions. The UN busybodies and the elite chattering classes can hector all they want, and they may very well succeed in getting the US and Old Europe to agree to economy-killing restrictions, but the rest of the world won’t play along. Unless the whole world rations, carbon caps won’t work. All that productivity, all that money, the lives and living standards of hundreds of millions of people, wasted. Even if AGW is real AND a long-term problem, carbon caps are not the solution. A solution must necessarily be technological (and there are a few ideas out there already).
Yet carbon caps are all we hear about. I suppose this self-privation fits in with the self-loathing and hatred of humanity that seems to be the hallmark of so many among the intelligentsia, but I also think that these people haven’t given a moment’s thought to the incredible human suffering their futile efforts at addressing an unverified problem are causing. Either that or they embrace a horrible and dissonant callousness towards the third-world poor, along the lines of 8they don’t know any better life so why worry about them* or there are too many people on the planet already.
A billion dollars a day spent to fight global warming, supposedly to help the poor and our future generations. A billion dollars a day, spent by people who claim that the poor will be the most harmed by rising sea levels. Yet those very same poor are the ones most harmed by the crusade against carbon fuels. Basic medical ethics begins with Primum non nocere i.e. first, do no harm. To help the poor, we don’t even have to re-task that billion dollars a day. We can simply stop wasting it, and natural forces will take care of the rest. Get out of their way, remove the impediments to their improving their lives, and they will take care of the rest – far better than the best-intentioned statist ever could.
Loading ...
Active Comment Threads
Most Commented Posts
Universal Background Checks – A Back Door to Universal Registration
COVID Mask Follies
When Everything Is Illegal…
An Anti-Vax Inflection Point?
“Not In My Name”
The Great Social Media Crackup
War Comes Through The Overton Window
The First Rule of Italian Driving
Most Active Commenters