The Real Climate Change Disaster

COP29, the global U.N. climate conference, is underway in Azerbaijan. Attendees at the conference (other than the host delegates and hundreds of fossil fuel lobbyists) have been bemoaning the fact that the world is way off target to keep warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius. They and their media sympathizers see the world heading for a climate disaster of biblical proportions in the next 50 years. As the Secretary-General said last week, the world must “pay up or humanity will pay the price.”

But climate activists seem oblivious to the disaster their policy proposals will plunge huge parts of the world into — not in 50 years, but in five. The first tremor of this climate policy-induced disaster occurred on the island country of Sri Lanka. Fertilizers are a little-known but important source of dreaded greenhouse gas emissions. The president of Sri Lanka, wanting to burnish his climate credentials, banned the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides in 2021. The unsurprising result less than a year later was a cratering of food production, spiking food prices, famine, and a great deal of social and political unrest.

Unmoved by this obvious drawback to their war on fertilizer, climate activists have been turning the screws on European farmers. Not only has the cost of what fertilizer they can get skyrocketed, they have seen the price of all their energy sources — electricity, diesel, natural gas — rise relentlessly. And like in Sri Lanka, protests have followed. Some researchers estimate that “net zero” goals in American farming would increase food prices by $1300 a year for the average family of four.

However, the impending climate policy disaster is not limited to farmers and the agriculture sector. Europe has been deindustrializing in the quixotic quest to reach net zero emission targets by 2030. Germany’s transition to green energy, while shuttering their nuclear power plants, led not only to increasing electricity prices but to reliance on electricity generation in neighboring France (ironically generated by French nuclear power plants).

Besides being the largest economy in Europe, Germany has historically had robust economic growth too. Not anymore. Germany’s economic growth over the past decade has hardly been stellar. This stagnation manifests on the ground in historic layoffs by legacy German company, Volkswagen. It can also be seen in the recent political turmoil of the governing coalition collapsing due to disagreements over how to deal with Germany’s economic problems.

The diagnosis for the rest of Europe is bleak. Although the U. S. has not traveled as far down this environmental road to disaster, it has hardly escaped unscathed. Electricity costs are twice those of China despite access to huge amounts of coal, oil, gas, advanced technology, and enormous financial capital.

Antiquated utilities, facing ever stricter emissions standards and expensive renewable energy mandates, continue to raise rates — putting U. S. manufacturers at a disadvantage. Social and economic inequality tends to be greatest in places that have implemented more climate restrictions — cue California’s labyrinthian environmental permitting, residential solar panel mandate, restrictive fuel standards, and prohibition on new combustion vehicles in the near future. (RELATED: The EPA’s ‘De Facto EV Mandate’ Faces Potential Supreme Court Scrutiny)

These issues are only the beginning of the epic disaster the world will experience under the proposed net-zero policies coming out of COP29. Deindustrialization is a luxury priority for wealthy elites — and one with a short shelf life. The rapid economic (and emissions) expansion of India and China has softened the blow thus far. People in China and India seem far more interested in becoming prosperous than in reducing their carbon footprint.

But the piper must be paid. Stagnant wages and stagnant economies can’t support extensive welfare states. And let’s not forget the geopolitical ramifications of low economic growth. Europe has become significantly less influential on the world stage relative to the U. S. and China because its economy has basically not grown over the past 15 years.

Deindustrialization has already created hardship for low and middle-income folks across the Western world. If we continue down this road, the consequences will grow increasingly deadly. More intermittent renewable energy generation and overtaxed energy grids will fail more frequently under extreme heat and extreme cold. Slow economic growth means less innovation and less technology. More expensive food and energy will create ever more difficult tradeoffs for those with less income.

Even more importantly, anti-growth climate policy will foreclose unknown future improvements in human welfare. While the costs attributed to Western industrialization and its accompanying greenhouse gas emissions over the last 50 years may be significant, they are dwarfed by the blessings of industrialization experienced by the poorest countries of the world: refrigeration, antibiotics, transportation, cheap food, etc.

Creating an immediate disaster to avoid a highly speculative one in the distant future makes no sense. A lot can happen between now and 2050 or now and 2100. What’s worse, anti-growth climate policies, even if adopted by the U. S. and Western Europe, are basically worthless if China and India continue their current emissions trajectories — adding more emissions each year than the U. S. and Europe can cut.

So, let’s avoid the immediate car wreck of net zero policies and worry about the potential accident 50 miles down the road later. The climate agenda threatens the prosperity and flourishing of billions of people today.

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