The New York Post published an article by noted researcher Bjorn Lomborg, Ph.D., in which he argues climate activists not only don’t care about people’s well-being, they, in fact, support policies that result in unnecessary deaths. Lomborg is right. Poverty, in part due to lack of access to reliable energy, and the modern health and agricultural innovations they make possible, is the world’s number one killer. Because most climate policies promote ending or sharply curtailing the use of fossil fuels in the short-term, they leave the poorest populations in poverty and vulnerable to extreme weather events, resulting in unnecessary deaths.
In the New York Post article, “Green activists don’t care how many people will die from zero fossil fuel use,” Bjorn Lomborg provides an array of data demonstrating that fewer people are dying from extreme weather and temperatures now than ever before as the planet has modestly warmed. His research indicates, however, that even fewer deaths would occur from these causes were it not for climate policies prematurely restricting fossil fuel development and use. Lomborg writes:
We endlessly hear the flawed assertion that because climate change is real, we should “follow the science” and end fossil fuel use.
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The assertion is convenient for politicians, because it allows them to avoid responsibility for the many costs and downsides of climate policy, painting these as inevitable results of diligently following the scientific evidence.
But it is false because it conflates climate science with climate policy.
The story told by activist politicians and climate campaigners suggests that there is nothing but benefits to ending fossil fuels, versus a hellscape if nothing is done.
But the reality is that the world over the past centuries has improved dramatically — largely because of the immense increase in available energy that has come mostly from fossil fuels.
Life spans have more than doubled, hunger has dramatically declined, and incomes have increased ten-fold.
Lomborg goes on to discuss the fact that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has found limited, or no evidence climate change is impacting most extreme weather events and that deaths attributable to extreme weather have declined by 97 percent over the past century even as the Earth warmed slightly, in large part due to the energy, materials, and products fossil fuels make possible.
Climate realism has made these same points across the course of hundreds of articles debunking false claims that extreme weather is getting worse and dozens of articles discussing the decline in premature mortality due to extreme weather, weather related diseased, and non-optimal temperatures.
In addition, Climate Realism has discussed the tremendous benefit modestly warmer temperatures, fossil fuels, and rising CO2 has produced for food production, saving millions from starvation. Lomborg makes this point as well.
“Four billion people — half the world’s population — entirely depend on food grown with synthetic fertilizer produced almost entirely by natural gas,” Lomborg says. “If we ended fossil fuels quickly, we would physically have no way to feed four billion people.”
Lomborg is right, net zero by 2025 is not just costly, $27 trillion per year on average, equal to a quarter of the worlds current GDP, over the century in a vain effort to control the weather, it is, in fact, nothing more than a road to economic decline and increased deaths. Lomborg concludes:
When politicians tell us they are “following the science,” they use the claim to shut down open discussion of the enormous costs of their policies.
“The science” informs us about the problem, but is not the arbiter of solutions.
Democracies are.
Sudden, dramatic cuts in fossil fuel consumption will have huge downsides — which their backers would rather ignore.
Climate change is a problem, but a civilization-endangering cure can be far worse than the illness.
The vast majority of Climate Realism posts debunk and deconstruct false claims of climate alarm being hyped by the mainstream media, but every so often we’ve got to give a media outlet kudos for allowing important truths about climate change to be told. This article by the New York Post is one such instance. Thanks, New York Post for boldly presenting truths that are inconvenient to the popular climate crisis narrative and unpopular with the woke media and politicians kowtowing to it, and to misanthropic climate activists funding the media narrative and, all too often, the politicians themselves.
