Matt Ridley
Despite these social and economic advantages, eco-toffs put
their self interest to one side and campaign selflessly for the
greater Gaian good, worry about the effect that climate change will
have on future generations and yearn for a more holistic version
economic growth.
But is greenery really quite so selfless? Take climate change.
The “synthesis report” of the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change, warns of an increased “likelihood” of
severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts if emissions continue.
But when you cut through the spin, what the IPCC is actually saying
is that there is a range of possibilities, from no net harm at all
(scenario RCP2.6) through two middling scenarios to one where
gathering harm from mid century culminates in potentially dire
consequences by 2100 (scenario RCP8.5).
This latter scenario makes wildly unrealistic assumptions about
coal use, trade, methane emissions and other things; RCP2.6 is
equally unrealistic in the other direction. So let’s focus on the
two middle scenarios, known as RCP4.5 and RCP6. In these more
realistic projections, if you use the latest and best estimates of the climate’s
“sensitivity” to carbon dioxide (somewhat lower than the
out-of-date ones still used by the IPCC), the most probable outcome is that world will be
respectively just 0.8 and 1.2 degrees Celsius warmer than today by
the last two decades of this century. .........
By contrast, the cost of climate policies is already falling
most heavily on today’s poor. Subsidies for renewable energy have
raised costs of heating and transport disproportionately for the
poor. Subsidies for biofuels have raised food prices by diverting
food into fuel, tipping millions into malnutrition and killing about 190,000 people a year. The
refusal of many rich countries to fund aid for coal-fired
electricity in Africa and Asia rather than renewable projects (and
in passing I declare a financial interest in coal mining) leaves more than a billion people without
access to electricity and contributes to 3.5 million deaths a year
from indoor air pollution caused by cooking over open fires of wood
and dung.
Greens think these harms are a price worth paying to stop the
warming. They want (other) people to bear such sacrifices today so
that the people of 2100, who will be up to seven times as rich, do
not have to face the prospect of living in a world that is perhaps
0.8 - 1.2 degrees warmer. And this is the moral high ground? "
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