As you may have heard, a United Nations convocation called “COP27” (an appropriate acronym for a body that seeks to police the lifestyles of us lesser beings) has established (that is, has agreed to engage in talks about someday establishing) a fund to compensate poor nations for the damage allegedly inflicted by Global Warming Climate Change Climate-Related Disasters. Joe Biden, following the Hobbit custom of giving presents to others on one’s birthday, has promised to kick in a billion dollars (to be provided by American taxpayers, not taken from Jim and Hunter Biden’s influence-peddling profits). A billion dollars doesn’t sound like much these days, but it’s only earnest money. The Dystopia Mafia wants much, much more.
Last July, a Dartmouth professor and one of his graduate students published a paper, “National attribution of historical climate damages”, that purports to quantify the costs that high-carbon-emitting nations have inflicted on the rest of the world. As summarized by an enthusiastic and credulous CNN report:
Researchers in a new study have put actual dollar figures on economic harm caused by the countries most responsible for the climate crisis, and the ground-breaking data could serve as a starting point for legal action against the world’s wealthiest nations.
The Dartmouth College study found that just five of the world’s top emitters of planet-warming gases – the United States, China, Russia, India, and Brazil – caused around a $6 trillion loss in gross domestic product from 1990 to 2014, adjusted for 2010 dollars, or about 11% of total global GDP.
The study also shows the US and China – the two biggest contributors to the climate crisis – individually caused global economic losses of more than $1.8 trillion each during that same period.
Despite much statistical jargon, it is pretty obvious that these conclusions are derived from speculation piled on top of surmise piled on top of guesswork, but even if they were unassailable, the paper’s methodology has a glaring and fatal flaw. It estimates how much richer the negatively impacted countries would be if the United States and other major carbon emitters had emitted much less in the past and yet had become just as rich. The hidden premise is that America’s $15 trillion economy would be the same size if coal, oil and natural gas didn’t exist.
That scenario is absurd. Without the use of fossil fuels for the past century or so, what is now the “First World” would be direly impoverished, and all the countries that Climate-Related Disasters affect would be poorer, too. Much of such wealth as they have is attributable to their dealings with rich countries: exports, offshored services, remittances from citizens working abroad, tourism, foreign aid. A true accounting would look not just at what climate change subtracts but at what energy produced by fossil fuels adds.
The point of analyses like the Dartmouth duo’s is not, however, to gauge economic consequences. Rather, they seek to furnish a rationale for turning the global economy into a gigantic lottery in which the winning tickets have been assigned to favored “victims” and responsibility for making the payouts has been imposed on alleged transgressors. There could be no surer way to cast away the economic progress of the past two hundred years.
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