ARE WE ADDRESSING CLIMATE CHANGE COMPLETELY WRONG?

Ahead of the new Festival Of Politics, a controversial but challenging analysis of our response to global warming

ALMOST everyone on this side of the Atlantic agrees that Donald Trump is about the most dangerous president in US history. When pushed to give concrete examples of why he’s so particularly bad, people tend to flounder. But high on their list, I usually find, is his outrageous decision to pull the United States out of the Paris Climate Agreement.

It was one of those rare and special moments when the whole world seemed united.

‘Very regrettable,’ said German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

‘A huge slap in the face’ and ‘a disaster for everyone’ said a Vatican spokesman.

‘Earth to Trump: **** You,’ said the German tabloid newspaper Berliner Kurier.

On this occasion, though, I’d argue that the world was wrong and Trump was right.

The Paris accord was not only an iniquitously bad deal for Americans – the blue collar workers who had voted in droves for him, especially – but also an utter waste of everyone else’s time, money and energy.

That’s because, despite what you heard at the time from over-enthusiastic environment correspondents, the agreement was onerous and toothless.

It was onerous for Western nations, the US especially, because it committed them to replacing cheap, reliable, abundant fossil energy with much more expensive renewables.

And it was toothless for everyone else, including fast-growing nations such as India and China, because it allowed them to go on burning as much fossil fuel as suited their economic needs.

Had he signed, Trump would have handed a huge competitive advantage to his overseas economic rivals to no useful purpose. The ‘Skeptical Environmentalist’ Bjorn Lomborg has published calculations, using the UN’s own figures, suggesting the difference the Paris Agreement will make to ‘climate change’ is virtually non-existent.

On an optimistic scenario (if everyone sticks to their Paris emissions reductions promises), his findings say that the pace of global warming by the end of this century may be reduced by 0.170 degrees C; on a pessimistic scenario, he says, it will be reduced by a mere 0.048 degrees C.

Is it all worth it, would you say? The cost of ‘decarbonising’ the world economy in order to avert ‘man-made global warming’ has been conservatively estimated at $1.5trillion a year. That’s about the same value as the global online shopping industry. The difference is that when you go shopping, you’re choosing how to spend your money, presumably on things you want or need.

With the climate change industry, on the other hand, the choice has been taken out of your hands.

A hefty chunk of your earnings is being spent on a gigantic scheme which appears so ineffective that, at best, it may reduce global warming by a temperature change smaller than the one you experience between having breakfast and getting to work.

Now you might reply: ‘Ah, but I still don’t mind paying to clean up the planet.’ No. Nor do I. As a nature lover myself, I’m aware there are lots of serious environmental problems that aren’t being properly addressed: overfishing, deforestation, pollution, poaching, depletion of the water tables through agriculture, and so on.

But none of these has anything to do with ‘climate change’ – a cause which has become so dominant a part of the environmental agenda that other issues now scarcely get a look in.

LET me stress that this is not an argument about the science of man-made global warming. Even if you accept every word of the ‘consensus’ that the planet is heating at an alarming, unprecedented rate and that humans are largely to blame, it remains the case that the measures we are taking to deal with it are first, inadequate, and second, harmful.

They’re inadequate because, despite the best efforts of UN climate conventions like the one in Bonn earlier this month, no country has volunteered to ‘decarbonise’ its economy to an extent that would make a significant difference to climate change.

This is especially true of growing economies like China, which plans to double its CO2 output by 2030, and India, which plans to treble it. So, even if countries like Ireland were to decarbonise unilaterally, it would barely make a scrap of difference. Not when China’s current total of global CO2 output is 24%.

Meanwhile, such measures as we are taking to ‘combat’ climate change are doing real harm, not only to our freedoms and our prosperity but also, ironically, to the environment itself.

Green evangelists may promise that salvation lies in abandoning fossil fuels in favour of ‘clean energy’ – ie renewables such as wind, solar and biofuels. But their solution is by no means cost-free.

For a start, it drives up the price of energy. Onshore wind energy, for example, is roughly twice as expensive as energy from a modern, gas-fuelled power station; offshore wind is three times more expensive.

Some may feel happy to pay the extra bit if they think they’re doing their bit to ‘save the planet’. Except, as we’ve seen, the difference it makes to climate change is marginal. Meanwhile, it drives the most vulnerable, mainly the poor and the elderly, into fuel poverty.

Worse, though, from an environmental perspective is the damage renewables do to nature.

Apart from blighting countryside for miles around, and relying on poisonous rare earth minerals mined, often under appalling conditions in China, wind turbines are causing devastation among flying wildlife. One conservation group SEO/Birdlife estimates that, in Spain alone, between 6million and 18million birds and bats are killed each year by wind turbines. Another study put bird deaths per turbine at 309 in Germany and 895 in Sweden.

Whatever the exact figure, the annual global death toll of birds and bats runs into the many millions.

OR consider the absurdity that vast acreages of virgin forest in the US are now chopped down every year and shipped 3,500 miles across the Atlantic to be burned as ‘biofuel’ instead of coal in power stations. This is purely because wood, being ‘renewable’, has been deemed an eco-friendly fuel source. Not in this case it isn’t.

A recent study has found that a wood-fired power station in Britain, Drax, is actually now emitting more CO2 than it did when it was burning purely fossil fuel. As for those forests: just because they’re in America rather than on our side of the pond doesn’t mean it’s not an environmental issue.

I could give you many more such examples of the havoc wreaked by the global warming industry in the course of its mission to save the world. This is why science writer Matt Ridley calls it using ‘chemotherapy to cure a cold.’

At the moment, I believe the threat of global warming is purely theoretical – existing mainly in the form of projections on climate scientists’ computer models.

I am convinced that the damage being done right now in the name of averting this theoretical threat is very costly – and very real.