The Cost of Global Warming Prevention

Global warming doomsayers have a tough row to hoe. Not only do they need to prove that the world a) is warming b) as a result of anthropogenic activity, they also have to prove c) that the cure they propose won't hurt more than the disease. The cost of reducing carbon emissions is huge - would warming be worse than delaying development, or investing in more expensive, "greener" sources of energy?

Bjorn Lomborg is the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, a must-read for anyone looking for the good news behind the headlines. The fact is, we're much better off now than we were a few years ago, and he has the data to prove it. He is evidently a believer in human-induced climate change, so he satisfies the a) and b) tests above, but he makes a convincing case that the cost of preventing warming is much greater than the benefits to be achieved. His most recent article on the subject was in today's Daily Mail.

Lomborg notes that "Japan's commitment in June to cut greenhouse gas levels 8 percent from 1990 levels by 2020 was scoffed at for being far too little. Yet for Japan - which has led the world in improving energy efficiency - to have any hope of reaching its target, it needs to build nine new nuclear power plants and increase their use by one-third, construct more than 1 million wind turbines, install solar panels on 3 million homes, double the percentage of new homes that meet rigorous insulation standards, and increase sales of "green" vehicles from 4 percent to 50 percent of its auto purchases." That's quite a tall order.

The costs aren't small. "Imagine for a moment that the fantasists win the day, and that at the climate conference in Copenhagen in December every nation commits to reductions even larger than Japan's, designed to keep temperature increases under 2 degrees Celsius.
The result will be a global price tag of $46 trillion in 2100, to avoid expected climate damage costing just $1.1 trillion, according to climate economist Richard Tol, a contributor to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. His findings were commissioned by the Copenhagen Consensus Center and are to be published by Cambridge University Press."

We in the West can talk about the costs imposed on wealthy nations, but the greatest cost is imposed on smaller nations that are deprived of reasonably-priced energy sources to power their development.