COMMENTARY: A climate change obsession

Over the past decade, the global elite’s obsession with climate change has taken away from the many other major problems facing the planet — shown most dramatically by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Western European leaders should have spent the decade diversifying energy sources and expanding shale gas, instead of shutting down nuclear plants and becoming scarily reliant on Russia. But the war is far from the only thing they have managed to ignore.

The biggest task facing humanity today remains lifting most of the world out of abject poverty. This can happen only by providing poor countries with comprehensive, reliable energy sources. That’s how the rich world became prosperous, and it is how China lifted almost a billion out of poverty. Yet, while the world’s rich countries are overwhelmingly powered by fossil fuels, the elite has worked hard to make these energy sources both more expensive and less available for the world’s poorest.

Right now, we’re still recovering from the worst pandemic in a century. Inflation, supply shortages and possibly even recession loom over the global economy. Autocracies are reasserting themselves, while food crises are already being experienced by the most vulnerable. Tuberculosis, malaria and malnutrition — each effectively handled in the rich world — still claim millions of lives each year across poor countries.

Yet major donors and development organizations have become increasingly focused on climate solutions instead. One month after Ukraine was invaded, the head of the United Nations — an organization focused on ensuring world peace — was instead warning about “climate catastrophe,” and the “mutually assured destruction” that fossil fuel “addiction” could cause.

It would be an exaggeration to say that while real threats were mounting, the rich world was tinkering with solar panels and banning plastic straws. But only a small exaggeration.

So how have the elites managed to get things so wrong? One reason is that for years the media have portrayed climate change effects as horrendous. Today, almost every natural disaster routinely gets blamed on the climate crisis, with every new hurricane held up as another exhibit of man’s folly. Yet, hurricanes killed many more people in the past. A major scientific paper from last month documents “decreasing trends” in global hurricane frequency and strength. The data show that last year the world experienced fewer hurricanes than ever before in the satellite era, and their combined strength was one of the lowest.

The real effect from climate change is much more nuanced. The U.N. climate panel of scientists finds that a warmer world will mean fewer (good) but stronger (worse) hurricanes. In total, this will increase damages (bad), but because the world will also get richer and more resilient, relative damages will keep declining, just slightly more slowly. This is a problem that we mustn’t ignore. But it is far from a catastrophe. Global climate damage in percent of gross domestic product keeps declining, and climate disaster deaths have dropped 99 percent in a century.

For the best sense of what to expect from a warming planet, we should turn to the damage estimates from the models used by President Joe Biden’s administration, and President Barack Obama’s before, to set climate policy. This research reveals that the entire global cost of climate change — not just to economies but in every sense — will be equivalent to less than a 4 percent hit to GDP by the end of the century.

Remember, by the United Nations’ own estimates the typical person in 2100 will be 450 percent as rich as today. Global warming means he or she will “only” be 434 percent as rich. This is a problem, but — contrary to the histrionics — far from catastrophic.

For wealthy countries, the narrow focus on climate objectives undermines future prosperity. The world already spends more than half a trillion dollars annually on climate policies, while rich world government spending on innovation in areas such as health care, space, defense, agriculture and science has been declining as a percentage of GDP over recent decades. This investment underpins our future growth. Together with a stagnant or declining education performance, rich world income has almost stalled this century. Compare this to China, where innovation spending is up 50 percent, education is rapidly improving and average incomes have increased fivefold since 2000.

Alarmingly, despite the extraordinary focus, we’re failing even to solve climate change itself. Last year saw the largest carbon dioxide emissions ever.

This year, the world’s elite gathered for the World Economic Forum and were asked to name “the most severe risks on a global scale over the next 10 years.” They absurdly chose “climate action failure” — right before Russia started bombing Chernobyl and Kyiv.

The world has many challenges, not just the ones that get the most media attention. Climate should be tackled more effectively by funding research and development in green energy sources so they eventually outcompete fossil fuels. We need to confront authoritarian expansionism in Ukraine and elsewhere. And to ensure long-term prosperity, the world needs more and cheaper energy, better education and more innovation.

We need our perspective back to overcome the elitist hyperbole on climate change.

Bjorn Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. His latest book is “False Alarm — How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet.”