$16 Trillion Wasted on Climate Change: Zero Impact, Infinite Costs

Environmental scholar Bjorn Lomborg recently calculated that governments worldwide have spent at least $16 trillion feeding the climate change industrial complex.

Arguably, not a single life has been or will be saved by this shameful and colossal misallocation of human resources.

The war on safe and abundant fossil fuels has cost countless lives in poor countries and made those nations poorer by blocking affordable energy access.

Since the global warming crusade began some 30 years ago, the planet’s temperature has not been altered by one-tenth of a degree — an outcome even climate alarmists acknowledge.

In other words, $16 trillion has been spent — with significant portions enriching individuals through government largesse — but there is no measurable benefit.

This waste is compounded by opportunity costs. What could we have done with $16 trillion to improve global well-being?

— Preventing avoidable deaths from diseases like malaria?
— Building schools in African villages to end illiteracy?
— Bringing reliable and affordable electricity to the more than 1 billion people without access?

Millions of lives could have been saved. Millions more could have been lifted out of poverty. The benefits of accelerating cancer research could have added tens of millions of additional years of life, with economic value in the tens of trillions of dollars.

Instead, we effectively poured $16 trillion down the drain.

For this reason, it is critical to identify the green “climate change” derangement syndrome as perhaps the most inhumane political movement in history.

The Sierra Club, the Environmental Defense Fund, the United Nations, and politicians including Al Gore, Joe Biden, and John Kerry — who championed and implemented this Green New Deal scam — should be placed on a wall of shame.

Biden’s administration alone wasted $400 billion on green energy initiatives and other climate change programs.

The only glimmer of hope is that the climate change neuroses appear to be subsiding.

We have reached peak global warming craziness in the United States, and even Europe seems to have turned its back on economically masochistic net zero fossil fuels mandates.

Donald Trump has wisely and rapidly dismantled the climate change industrial complex. Among his pro-growth economic policies, none may offer a higher long-term payoff than his recent order to repeal the anti-fossil fuels “endangerment rule” that taxed carbon dioxide emissions.

The cost of that regulation was estimated to exceed $1 trillion over time.

We cannot recapture the $16 trillion wasted on this false crisis. But we can stop the madness of believing that politicians who cannot even pay off their credit card balances could alter the world’s temperature.

Stephen Moore is a former Trump senior economic adviser and cofounder of Unleash Prosperity, which advocates for education freedom for all children.