Current climate treaties a lot of hot air
- By Bjorn Lomborg
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E-mail China Daily, November 30, 2015
China has promised to cut how much carbon dioxide it emits for every yuan by 60-65 percent by 2030. China's last promise for 2020 of an intensity cut of 40-45 percent was relatively light-it would probably have been achieved without any additional policies. It would be a mistake to assume that the 2030 target will be as easy. Studies by the Asian Modeling Exercise suggest that a 60 percent cut could cost about $200 billion annually in lost GDP growth.
And living up to the Paris climate promise of peaking CO2 emissions around 2030 could easily cost China $400 billion or more in lost GDP.
So the promises of the EU, Mexico, the US and China will diminish the global economy by at least $730 billion a year by 2030-and that is in an ideal world, where all the globe's politicians consistently reduce emissions most efficiently. If politicians make less efficient decisions, history shows costs could double.
Factoring in the other 122 nations, this treaty will leave the global economy worse off by about $1 trillion dollars every year for the rest of the century-and that is if the world's politicians do everything right.
China knows cheap and plentiful power is crucial. Over 30 years it has lifted 680 million people out of poverty-more than any nation ever in history-and this has been powered by cheap coal. In a new report, the International Energy Agency estimates that China gets just 0.02 percent of its energy from electric solar cells and 0.3 percent from wind. Despite the total energy from solar and wind increasing more than 13-fold, China will still get just 3 percent from solar and wind in 2040.
Power is one of the most crucial inputs for poverty eradication so it is crucial for China to continue to focus on getting more power at low costs. The real solution to climate change will come from investing much more in research and development into green energy sources, in order to make the likes of solar and wind more efficient and able to compete with fossil fuels.
Until then, climate treaties will just be hot air.
The author is director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center and visiting professor at Copenhagen Business School.
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