The Patriot Post® · A Climate of Winners and Losers

Rest easy, everyone, our leaders are on the case. In Dubai this week and next, the United Nations is hosting its climate summit, where heads of government convene to wrestle with the supposedly existential threat of climate change.

In fact, this one is the 28th such annual meeting. After so many years, it’s a familiar scene — private jets lining the tarmac, luxurious accommodations, sumptuous meals, impassioned speeches, and dueling pledges of support. By week’s end we can expect to hear that the threat is more imminent and severe than we ever thought, and we’ll be told just how much money we must throw at it.

Please pardon my skepticism. But after a quarter of a century of climate mumbo-jumbo, endless scare stories, and reckless spending, it is not obvious that we’ve accomplished anything at all.

The essential point here is that climate change is not just some abstract scientific curiosity. International commitments prompt policy actions here at home. We are already deep in the hole of climate change investment — before we keep digging, we ought to take stock of who is impacted by those policies and in what ways.

At first blush, this one might seem to be a slam dunk. What’s not to like about saving the planet? Aren’t we all winners?

Maybe, maybe not. That’s only true if climate change is the planet-threatening crisis we’ve been led to believe and if the actions we take have any chance of preventing it. Neither is clear.

Yes, the earth is getting warmer, and yes, that warming is likely due in part to mankind’s use of fossil fuels in energy generation. We learned just a few weeks ago that the summer of 2023 was the hottest on record.

The increasing temperatures are quite real, but they are just a small part of a very big picture. Although we have only a few decades of reliable temperature measurements, we know from scientific geological examination that global temperatures have cycled between extremely hot and extremely cold over the earth’s entire lifetime. In fact, in many of those climate cycles — and long before human beings came along to mess everything up — temperatures were far higher than those predicted to result from current carbon emissions.

Translation: Our planet’s climate has been incompatible with human life before, and at some point in the future it is sure to be again. We humans are just temporary inhabitants.

As responsible tenants, however, it is within our power to mitigate the harm fossil fuels do to the atmosphere and possibly to forestall the onset of more damaging climate change effects.

The trick will be to do so without doing more harm than good. So, before we go too crazy in our quest to eliminate fossil-fired energy, let’s check the score card on winners and losers.

In the foreseeable future, and certainly before doing so will have any measurable effect on global temperatures, the winners will be primarily the beneficiaries of government largesse in trying to jump-start the shift — namely, the business owners and investors in green technology, and buyers of electric vehicles. And it is worth noting that both groups are generally the wealthier among us.

The losers of overly aggressive actions to eliminate fossil fuels are vastly more numerous. They are the ones whose health — even survival — hinges on the availability of energy, particularly electricity. Nearly a billion people in this world currently have little or no access to electricity, directly causing adverse health and shortened lifespans. For those in that segment of the global population, drastic reduction in fossil fuel-fired electricity generation will further diminish electricity supply and increase its cost, significantly worsening their plight.

And more broadly, the economic effects of our rush to decarbonize touch everyone. Massive public investment in green energy — high expenditures with little net GDP gain — is inherently inflationary.

Despite constant alarmist rhetoric about an existential threat, the public remains unconvinced. Recent pre-election polling in the U.S. shows climate change to be relatively low on the list of public concerns.

Just last week, a letter to our president from 4,000 American auto dealership owners pointed out that even with the massive government incentives (paid for by you and me), electric vehicles are piling up in inventories. Americans are justifiably wary of electric vehicle range limitations, the impracticality of slow charging, and the uncertain availability of reliable charging stations.

In that respect and others, it is becoming clear that the price of extreme measures to combat the threat of climate change far exceeds their very uncertain benefit.

In dealing with climate change, as with so many issues of the day, we must find the sweet spot — the path to good stewardship of the planet without undue harm to its inhabitants. That calls for a balanced energy portfolio — and steering well clear of free-lunch green new deals.