The cost of a climate action plan exceeds any benefits

Since the 1970s, environmental alarmists have been predicting the “end of the civilization in five years” if their latest demands to change the climate aren’t implemented immediately.

As near as I can tell we are still here, the climate changes hourly, and those alarmists are still making their predictions and demanding change. Their dog whistle key terms have changed over the decades; in the 1970s it was fear of an “iceage,” a few years ago they were anguished over “global warming,” and after record snow falls, they have changed to “climate change.”

Let’s face it, Santa Barbara County, California, and the United States are but a very small fraction of the Earth’s surface. What we do here matters little in the grand scheme of things and no matter how many electric vehicles we have, it won’t change anything except adding more hazardous waste from the production and eventual disposal of the batteries, overtaxing the electrical grid, creating blackouts, and raising electrical rates beyond the reach of many citizens.

In our county, we have witnessed drought, floods, and one night in the late 1970s in Lompoc there was a mix of snow and rain at Ocean and H Street. In the late 1980s the temperature got down to 18 degrees and snow topped Tranquillion Peak on Vandenberg Space Force Base.

My point is that weather happens and if you watch nationwide weather reports—I like the farmers weather on the RFD Channel or the National Weather Service website—you’ll see broad changes across the continental U.S. daily.

All those climate alarmists can make all the extraordinary claims they want to about the so called “climate crisis,” but hot air expelled while “building collective power to test, incubate, and scale community-led solutions to complex problems” won’t change the weather.

Worrying about wildfires is a legitimate concern; however, the various environmental groups seem to conflict with one another. Fire is needed in nature to cleanse dead and dying vegetation so that when an unwanted fire occurs, it can be more easily controlled. And clearing out all that old vegetation provides room for new growth. But some environmental groups vehemently oppose controlled burning.

To illustrate, in Lompoc several years ago a fire burned a large grove of pine trees near the summit of Harris Grade; hundreds of trees were “lost.” However, the next spring even more trees popped up out of the soil. The fire had released seeds from the small pinecones; this is how nature works.

On their webpage, the Community Environmental Council claims, “We have pioneered environmental solutions for more than 50 years. And we believe that together we can reverse climate change, repair the damage, and protect local communities from extreme weather effects.”

Judging by their highlights list, they hold a lot of meetings, provide advice, and champion the latest climate changing fad. But they don’t claim any tangible accomplishment that led to an improved climate, and if they have been at it for 50 years and still think it’s an “urgent threat,” then they don’t have any street credibility at all.

So, what’s the cost? Well, a Copenhagen Consensus Center Nobel Prize winning economist, Bjorn Lomborg, writing in Imprimis thinks it could be anywhere between $20 trillion to $100 trillion to lower the temperature by a few degrees, assuming all countries on the globe cooperate—which is highly unlikely. One thing is sure, though, the cost to taxpayers and consumers in the U.S. will be significant.

Lomborg wrote, “Since we must bear the costs of the policies as well as the costs of climate change, we and our policymakers should take both into account. This is a point made by Yale University climate economist William Nordhaus. He argues that the higher the global temperature, the greater the negative economic impact as a percentage of global GDP. For example, a zero degree Fahrenheit increase in temperature has a zero percent impact on global GDP. But if the temperature rises by 7.4 degrees Fahrenheit by the year 2100—which is the approximate worst-case scenario if we do nothing about climate change—there would be a 4 percent decline in global GDP. 

“I hasten to add that the UN, the OECD [Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development], the World Bank, and several other organizations predict that the average person in the world will be 450 percent as rich in 2100 than he or she is today. 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.” 

So, the cost of the solution is far greater than the potential damage. The U.S. government is now preparing to hand out $400 billion for green energy projects, and this is just the beginning of the trip down the climate change rabbit hole. And Fox News reported that “the Biden administration is reportedly considering ‘stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) and marine cloud brightening.’” Theoretically this would partially block the sun and lower the Earth’s temperature. 

After wide criticism of the proposal, the White House then changed its story and said, “There are no plans underway to establish a program researching solar modification.”

In the meantime, climate change experts will keep jetting around from country to country in search of solutions to a problem that other experts claim they contribute to by jetting around to have meetings. 

Ron Fink writes to the Sun from Lompoc. Write your own letter in response by emailing it to letters@santamariasun.com.

This article appears in Jul 13-23, 2023.