Environmental scholar Bjorn Lomborg estimates that governments worldwide have already poured at least $16 trillion into what critics now call the climate change industrial complex, with precious little to show for it beyond a vast transfer of wealth to green special interests.
According to Hot Air, that staggering sum has not demonstrably saved a single life, even as the political war on reliable, affordable fossil fuels has imposed deadly costs on the worlds poorest people. The war on safe and abundant fossil fuels has cost countless lives in poor countries and made those countries poorer by blocking affordable energy, the argument goes, underscoring how climate policy orthodoxy has often prioritized ideological purity over human survival and economic development.
Over roughly three decades of global warming activism, even many climate alarmists concede that the planets temperature trajectory has not been altered by one-tenth of a degree. In that light, the $16 trillion outlay looks less like prudent stewardship and more like a monument to futility: $16 trillion has been spent -- a lot of people got very, very rich off the government largesse -- but there is not a penny of measurable payoff.
Economists describe this failure in terms of opportunity cost, the unseen price of what might have been achieved had those resources been deployed more wisely. Instead of subsidizing politically connected green ventures and regulatory crusades, that money could have been directed toward tangible, life-saving priorities that respect both human dignity and fiscal responsibility.
What if the $16 trillion had been spent on clean water for poor countries? the critique asks, pointing to basic infrastructure that would immediately reduce disease and death. Preventing avoidable deaths from diseases like malaria? Building schools in African villages to end illiteracy? Bringing reliable and affordable electric power to the more than 1 billion people who still lack access? Curing cancer?
Many millions of lives could have been saved, the author contends, had Western elites chosen practical compassion over climate virtue-signaling. We could have lifted millions more out of poverty, and the benefits of speeding up the race for the cure for cancer could have added tens of millions of additional years of life at an economic value in the tens of trillions of dollars.
Instead, the $16 trillion has effectively been poured down the drain, a moral and economic debacle that conservative critics now describe as a defining failure of modern progressive politics. For this reason, it is important that we identify the green climate change derangement syndrome as perhaps the most inhumane political movement in history, a charge that reflects growing frustration with policies that sacrifice human flourishing on the altar of ideological climate targets.
The indictment extends to the institutional drivers of this agenda, from major environmental groups to global bureaucracies and left-leaning politicians. The people at the Sierra Club, the Environmental Defense Fund and the United Nations, and politicians like Al Gore, Joe Biden and John Kerry who voted for and carried out this Green New Deal scam, should be placed on a wall of shame, the piece declares, noting that Biden's administration alone wasted $400 billion on green energy and other sham climate change programs.
There are, however, signs that the fever may be breaking as voters and businesses recoil from the economic self-harm of net-zero dogma. The one sliver of good news is that it appears the climate change neuroses have finally started to subside, the author writes, adding, We've reached peak global warming craziness in the U.S., for sure, and even Europe seems to have turned its back on its economically masochistic net zero fossil fuels obsession.
Against that backdrop, Donald Trumps agenda is cast as a deliberate effort to unwind what conservatives see as a sprawling, unaccountable climate bureaucracy. Donald Trump is wisely and rapidly dismantling the climate change industrial complex, the commentary notes, arguing that of all his pro-growth economic policies, there may be none with a higher longtime payoff than his recent order to repeal the mother of all costly regulations: the anti-fossil fuels endangerment rule taxing carbon dioxide emissions, a rule whose cost had been estimated to exceed $1 trillion over time.
The $16 trillion already squandered on a false crisis cannot be reclaimed, and sunk costs are, alas, sunk, but the piece insists that policymakers can still change course. We can stop the madness of actually believing that politicians who can't even pay off the balance on their credit cards can somehow change the world's temperature, writes Stephen Moore, a former Trump senior economic adviser and cofounder of Unleash Prosperity, which advocates for education freedom for all children, arguing that a renewed commitment to affordable energy, limited government, and human-centered priorities is long overdue.
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