Yahoo Finance Matthew Lau: Yes, it’s hot. That says nothing about climate change costs and benefits
The summer heat is liable to inflame the fervour of global warming activists and make many of the rest of us wonder whether they might have a point after all. Just last month, warming activists (a group that includes the prime minister) blamed climate change for increasing wildfires like the ones that sent smoke over Toronto and other major cities. As always, the activists should be ignored and the scientific evidence considered instead. Scientists have not established a link between carbon emissions and fires, and the fact is Canadian forest fires, after increasing for the three decades ending in 1990, have been declining for the three decades since. Even if this summer’s anomaly begins a new upward trend, claiming global warming is the cause is dubious: the climate in 2023 is pretty much the same as in 2022.
The real negative impacts of global warming, notwithstanding some hotter summer days, are minor, even decades into the future, when the projected costs do increase. A report earlier this year by President Joe Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers and the Office of Management and Budget summarized a dozen studies on the effect of global warming on U.S. GDP. Their aggregate model estimated global warming since the pre-industrial period (1851-1900) has reduced it by something like one-tenth of one per cent. By comparison, a Parliamentary Budget Officer report in 2018 estimated Canada’s federal carbon tax would cut our GDP by 0.35 per cent by 2022, so the cost to Canadians of a few years of carbon taxation is estimated to be about three times higher than the cost to Americans of more than a century of global warming.
Mainstream estimates are that global temperatures will be around 2.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial period by the end of the century, which would cause U.S. GDP in the year 2100 to be two per cent lower than it would otherwise have been – a figure small enough to be a rounding error. Looking at Canada’s carbon tax, Ross McKitrick and Elmira Aliakbari estimated in a Fraser Institute study in 2021 that the tax would cut GDP by 1.8 per cent by 2030, so the cost to Canadians of the Liberal carbon tax over a decade is as high as the cost to Americans of the next 80 years of global warming. Moreover, in Canada the climate is colder than it is in the U.S. so the costs of global warming may well be lower here, even to the point where the harms may be entirely offset by benefits. As Bjorn Lomborg points out, across Canada and the United States deaths from extreme cold outnumber deaths from extreme heat by a ratio of 40 to one. Some warming could therefore help save lives.
Nevertheless, the hot summer days are inconvenient, and mitigating their unpleasant effects is a good idea. On how to do this, there are two main competing views. The one promoted by the activists involves not only higher taxation, but also over $120 billion in federal government money already spent during the past seven years with many more billions of dollars to come in future government budgets, plus a prohibition on the sale of gas-powered cars by 2035, plus many other central planning initiatives. These are not proven methods for reducing the incidence of hot summer days.
Take for example the federal government’s plans to ban gas-powered cars and eliminate all related federal and provincial spending, with the goal of encouraging electric vehicle purchases. As Mark P. Mills summarizes in a Manhattan Institute study, the CO2 emissions from manufacturing EV batteries “substantially offset reductions from avoiding gasoline and, as the demand for battery minerals explodes, the net reductions will shrink, may vanish, and could even lead to a net increase in emissions. Similar emissions uncertainties are associated with producing the power for EV charging stations.” So: many billions of government dollars spent, a major industry reorganized from the top down, consumer choice trampled, and CO2 emissions may still rise.
In stark contrast to the failed prescriptions of the activists on how to mitigate the effects of hot summers, the second view — much more sensible and proven — is to buy a good fan and use it. At the beginning of the summer, I spent $21.98, plus tax, on a small portable fan, which Amazon shipped within days. Sending even three such fans to every man, woman, and child in Canada would cost only about $3 billion and would do far more to offset the harms of global warming than the over $120 billion the federal Liberals have already spent on climate initiatives.
End the climate policy madness! The summer heat should make us fans of fans, not central planning.
Matthew Lau is a Toronto writer.
