What do you get for twenty-five years of global, regional, national, and provincial climate policies?

Nothing to celebrate, according to one of the world’s leading environmental economists, someone who is also a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and who believes firmly in man-made global warming, as well as favoring a tax on carbon dioxide emissions.

“Twenty-five years of climate policy has made most of us a little poorer," Richard Tol told an audience at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., October 30, and "some of us a little richer.”

Which people fall into which group?

The vast majority of people are “a little poorer” — some, I would suggest, a lot poorer — because climate policies have raised energy prices, with a ripple effect on all other prices, hurting consumers and most producers alike and leading to job losses, lower GDP per capita, and in some cases “fuel poverty,” which now kills thousands every winter in the United Kingdom because they can no longer afford to heat their homes adequately.

A few are “a little richer” — some, I would suggest, a lot richer. They are the climate researchers who benefit from the roughly $1 billion a day the world’s governments spend on climate research, and the executives and stockholders of companies that reap government subsidies producing wind turbines, such as Siemens in Germany and General Electric in the United States, or solar arrays, such as Trina Solar in China and First Solar and SunPower (not to mentioned Solyndra, whose top executives survived its bankruptcy handsomely) in the U.S.

But don’t climate policies benefit everyone by mitigating global warming and the risks it brings?

No, says Tol. The policies haven’t significantly accelerated progress in reducing “CO₂ intensity,” i.e., how much CO₂ gets emitted per unit of production.

“CO₂ intensity in the economy has come down, but you can’t really see a trend break in 1990,” when policies first began to come into effect. “It just seems that the last 20 years were a continuation of the trends 20 years before.” In short, the world’s economies’ CO₂ intensity has been improving, but not because of any climate policies.

Nonetheless, the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change’s 21st Conference of the Parties, meeting in Paris late this month and early in December, will try to reach some kind of global agreement to cut CO₂ emissions — and to transfer money from developed to developing nations to atone for warming the former supposedly have already caused. The developing nations demand an initial fund of $100 billion a year, and India alone has already floated figures well above that.

In all likelihood, no substantive agreement will result, because developed nations have made it clear that they won’t make emission reduction or money transfer commitments that don’t include developing nations, and developing nations (like China and India, with together have about a third of the world’s population) have made it clear that they won’t make commitments that hinder their conquest of poverty, which requires use of abundant, affordable, reliable energy, mainly from fossil fuels.

Some observers have celebrated the fact that China and India have announced plans to curb their CO₂ emissions sometime after 2030, but those plans actually call for less reduction than business-as-usual economic projections, Tol pointed out, and they allow for massive expansion before then. He added that poor emissions statistics in both countries make accurate estimates and hence credible forecasts impossible.

Tol predicts nothing substantive will come out of Paris, despite the $100 million a year spent sending representatives to such confabs. “As a taxpayer,” Tol said, “I think you should be dismayed.”

In recent weeks a petition, Forget ‘Climate Change,’ Energy Empowers the Poor, has been gaining momentum, If many people embrace Tol’s thinking, their number could skyrocket — as Presidential candidate Barack Obama promised electricity prices would, because of his climate policies, if he were elected.

Horace Cooper is a legal commentator and a fellow with the Heartland Institute.