U.N. Secretary General António Guterres and many Western leaders, including the current administration in the U.S., tend toward the end-of-the-world point of view: "The world is facing a grave climate emergency.... Every week brings new climate-related devastation. Floods. Drought. Heatwaves. Wildfires. Superstorms.... We are in a battle for our lives.... Climate change is the biggest threat to the global economy." These claims are echoed endlessly in the media.
One of the reasons it is so difficult to have a sensible conversation about the climate is because we tend only to talk about what the climate will do, not what humans will do.
So if Nordhaus is correct about the cost of doing nothing about climate change, we will each still be 434 percent as rich by the end of the century-far from the end-of-the-world scenario predicted by climate alarmists.
In 2018, Nordhaus received the Nobel Prize in economics for his studies showing we should shoot for the temperature change that minimizes the sum of the cost of climate change and the cost of climate policy, which is 6.75 degrees Fahrenheit.
At the Copenhagen Consensus Center, we assembled over 50 of the world's top climate economists, including three Nobel laureates, with the goal of trying to figure out how to get the best return on each dollar spent on the climate.
The net economic result was that every dollar the EU spent on climate led to a reduction of three cents in worldwide climate damages.
Many on the left won't like that the Paris Agreement is shown to be bad. Many on the right won't like that by the same economic methodology, a smartly-conceived carbon tax is shown capable of delivering as much as two dollars in climate change benefits for each dollar in climate policy costs.
https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/thinking-smartly-about-climate-change/
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