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Monday, February 15, 2021

"Biden’s climate ‘fix’ is fantastically expensive and perfectly useless By Bjorn Lomborg"

Source:


"Across the world, politicians are going out of their way to promise fantastically expensive climate policies.

President Biden has promised to spend $500 billion each year on climate — about 13 percent of the entire federal revenue.

The European Union will spend 25 percent of its budget on climate.

Most rich countries now promise to go carbon-neutral by mid-century.

Shockingly, only one country has made a serious, independent estimate of the cost: New Zealand found it would optimistically cost 16 percent of its GDP by then, equivalent to the entire current New Zealand budget.

The equivalent cost for the US and the EU would be more than $5 trillion.

Each and every year.

That is more than the entire US federal budget, or more than the EU governments spend across all budgets for education, recreation, housing, environment, economic affairs, police, courts, defense and health.

... The yellow-vest protests against eco-taxes that have rankled France since 2018 could become a permanent feature of many or most rich societies.

Yet politicians obsessively focus on climate.

... Most voters aren’t willing to pay for these extravagant climate policies.

While Biden proposes spending the equivalent of $1,500 per American per year, a recent Washington Post survey showed that more than half the population was unwilling to pay even $24.

And for what?

If all the rich countries in the world were to cut their carbon emissions to zero tomorrow and for the rest of the century, the effort would make an almost unnoticeable reduction in temperatures by 2100.


This is because more than three-quarters of the global emissions in the rest of this century will come from Asia, Africa and Latin America.

... Take the terrible air pollution in Los Angeles in the 1950s.

It wasn’t fixed by naïvely asking people to stop driving cars.

Instead, it was fixed through innovation — the catalytic converter allowed people to drive further yet pollute little.

We need to invest in research to make green energy much cheaper ...