WHO: Economic Development Trumps Climate Change

George Rebane

In his regular WSJ column on climate change issues, Bjorn Lomborg of the Copenhagen Consensus and Stanford's Hoover Institution shines a light on the little reported aspects of the World Health Organization’s analysis of factors affecting the health of the world’s poor in the coming decades. (here) The bottom line, hidden by the Left and its lamestream media, is that more lives will be saved (by millions) through continuing the current course of global economic development, than will be saved by adopting the stringent climate change policies as prescribed by the Paris climate agreement and at next month’s Glasgow Climate Conference.  All such policies are based on utility functions which overwhelmingly favor policies that are ‘deemed’ to reduce global warming over other factors, primarily the effects of economic development on the QoL and health of the world’s poor.

The lives saved annually in 2050 by implementing existing and anticipated global warming accords is projected at 85,000.  However, over a spread of economic growth scenarios impacted by policies seeking to reduce preventable manmade global warming, the annual deaths range from 300,000 to 2,000,000 from malnutrition among the world’s poor.  If saving lives, especially among the poor, ever becomes important in these politicized and dubiously scientific considerations, then sanity advises avoiding draconian approaches such as contemplated in the Green New Deal and the additional socialist diktats on our lives and livelihoods planned by the Biden administration and amplified by established radicals such as are ensconced in Sacramento and Albany.  Per today’s dominant media and government narratives, these conclusions remain invisible to the general public.

Comments

[Scott O]

So we save 85,000 lives or 2,000,000.
As a famous guy just told us - "sometimes you have to make hard choices".
And since our Green Leaders don't know any of the people that will die from their "hard choice" - well...

[The Estonian Fox]

From the MIT Review: https://connect.xfinity.com/appsuite/#!!&app=io.ox/mail&folder=default0/INBOX

"The plummeting costs of renewables, the growing strength of the clean energy sector, and the rising influence of activists have begun to shift the politics of climate action in the US, panelists argued during MIT Technology Review’s annual EmTech conference last week.

Those forces allowed President Joe Biden to put climate change at the center of his campaign and helped build momentum behind the portfolio of clean energy policies and funding measures in the infrastructure and reconciliation packages under debate in the US Congress.

However, for all the progress on climate issues, well-funded and politically influential utility and fossil-fuel interests continue to impede efforts to overhaul energy systems at the speed and scale required.

Other speakers on the panel included Leah Stokes, an associate professor focused on energy and climate policy at the University of California, Santa Barbara. When we say to people, ‘We’re going to make it more expensive for you to use an essential good, which is energy,’ that isn’t very popular,” Stokes said. “That theory of political change has run up against the reality of income inequality in this country.”

“The different paradigm is to say, ‘Rather than making it more expensive to use fossil fuels, let’s help make it cheaper to use the clean stuff,’” she added."

Those darn fossil-fuel guys are IMPEDING your transition to reliable electricity - if you could just get more of the plummeting-cost renewables onto the grid. And make sure you don't say 'more expensive'.

[scenes]

I admit that I'm a little mystified by the energy policy of the Left. It's never well expressed but they know it when they see it.

It seems to consist of destroying all 'dirty' sources of heat and electricity (nuclear power, natural gas, coal), it's infrastructure (pipelines, oil rigs), and it's consumers (ICE cars, home natgas hook ups, etc.) and then hope like hell that market demand will produce magic green solutions. In for a watt-hour, in for a kilowatt-hour I guess, like Sherman through the South while destroying the railroad lines behind you.

You can pretty well track improvements in solar panels, batteries, and efficiency improvements and see that the real result will be demand vastly outstripping supply. The wealthy will have Tesla Powerwalls and the not-so-wealthy will live in favelas. It's for the children after all.

[Walt]

What Joe passes for economic development.
https://dailycaller.com/2021/10/08/joe-biden-real-progress-made-disappointing-jobs-report-september/
"President Joe Biden dismissed concerns after September’s disappointing jobs report, telling the nation Friday that “real progress” is being made."

The "real" progress is the destruction of the nation.

[The Estonian Fox]

Scenes @ 6:23AM-

I take issue with your use of the word "favelas". Latest LIB approved usage = favelx.

[This message approved by nearly 3% of all Latinx. OK, OK, 0.028%. That's almost 1 in every 3000.]

[scenes]

re: [email protected]:00AM

Oh well, it's part of that new generx in español.

Question of the morning. Is all of the chosen pronoun stupidity being done outside of the English language? The whole 2SLGBTQQIA+ (h/t to J. Trudeau) insanity looks to be an Anglosphere affliction mostly. There's probably a sociology paper hidden in the normalization of mental illness in late-stage empires.

Hopefully our new Thought Leaders can cook up amazing new energy technology. Corporations run by HR departments are bound to be ideally suited to the needs of the future.