Economy
Climate researchers show we’re actually “safer than ever from climate” catastrophes
The climate safety denial movement
I and others have documented that we’re safer than ever from climate. Catastrophists can’t refute us, so they’re now saying that disaster deaths don’t matter!
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For decades climate catastrophists have portrayed climate disasters as getting deadlier and deadlier.
Now that I and others have documented that we’re safer than ever from climate, catastrophists are saying that disaster deaths don’t matter!
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- Reuters says “Drop in climate-related disaster deaths not evidence against climate emergency.”
But a drop in deaths from something—here, a 98% drop—is obvious evidence against it being an emergency.
Would Reuters say: “98% drop in flu deaths not evidence against flu emergency”?¹
- Why is Reuters, along with The New York Times, PolitiFact, and USA Today, claiming that a 98% drop in climate disaster deaths doesn’t contradict their climate emergency narrative? Because it obviously does, and they can only save their narrative by intimidating us into denying the obvious.²
- The central narrative of climate catastrophists is that fossil fuels and their CO2 emissions are killing more and more people via climate disasters.
This narrative has always had a fatal weakness: it totally contradicts the data, which show plummeting climate disaster deaths.³
- Why are climate disaster deaths plummeting as fossil fuel use and CO2 emissions rise?
Because the enormous ability uniquely cost-effective and scalable fossil fuel energy gives us to master climate danger far outweighs any new climate challenges from CO2 emissions.
- An example of fossil-fueled climate mastery overwhelming CO2 impacts is drought.
Any contribution of rising CO2 to drought has been overwhelmed by fossil-fueled irrigation and crop transport, which have helped reduce drought deaths by over 100 times over 100 years as CO2 levels have risen.⁴
- Over the last decade, I and a number of others, including Bjorn Lomborg and Michael Shellenberger, have challenged catastrophism by pointing to declining climate disaster deaths.
Catastrophists couldn’t refute our argument. So instead they pretended it didn’t exist.
Until last year.⁵
- In 2023, climate catastrophists finally felt compelled to address the fact that climate disaster deaths have plummeted (driven by fossil-fueled climate mastery).
Because of honesty? No—because Presidential candidates started bringing it up and persuading people with it.
- Here is Vivek Ramaswamy during his Presidential campaign referring to a 98% decline in climate disaster deaths—and, crucially, giving fossil fuel energy credit.
- Here is Ron DeSantis during his Presidential campaign referring to a 98% decline in climate disaster deaths—and, crucially, giving fossil fuel energy credit.
- The 98% decline in climate disaster deaths, driven by fossil fuels, is a blockbuster fact: it shows that we are experiencing not fossil-fueled climate emergency but fossil-fueled climate safety.
But instead of being happy, catastrophists engage in climate safety denial.
- Here are 3 recent instances of climate safety denial—from Reuters, PolitiFact, and USA Today. All have long portrayed climate deaths as a fast-increasing problem. But now they claim deaths don’t matter.
https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/drop-climate-related- disaster-deaths-not-evidence- against-climate-emergency- 2023-09-19/ - Climate safety denial utilizes 5 main myths to evade the decline in disaster deaths:
1. Fossil fuels don’t deserve credit
2. Weather forecasting deserves the credit
3. 100 years is a misleading period
4. Damages are drastically increasing
5. There’s a major increase in reported disasters - Myth 1: Fossil fuels don’t deserve much credit for plummeting climate disaster deaths; it’s “resilience.”
Truth: Uniquely cost-effective and scalable fossil fuel energy makes us resilient through plentiful infrastructure-building, heating and cooling, irrigation, transportation, etc.⁶
- Myth 2: Storm warning systems deserve the credit for plummeting climate disaster deaths.
Truth: Drought, not storm, deaths are the leading source of reduced climate deaths. And fossil fuels power storm warning and evacuation systems (and more resilient infrastructure).⁷
- Myth 3: 100 years is a misleading period to measure plummeting climate disaster deaths.
Truth: 100 years is a standard, very meaningful period to look at. While we have data going back an additional two decades, those tend to underreport due to less global communication.⁸
- Contrary to the claim that starting analysis of climate disaster deaths in the 1920s overestimates the decline, it actually likely underestimates the decline due to insufficient past reporting; data before WWII extremely likely underreport deaths compared to data after 2000.
- Myth 4: There is an alarming increase in reported disasters, revealing an underlying climate emergency.
Truth: The increase in reported disasters over time is due overwhelmingly to increased global communication. Changes in fundamentals, such as storms, are extremely modest.⁹
- The claim that more reported disasters show an increasingly dangerous climate is absurd in light of the fact that underlying data show massive increases in reporting before significant human climate impacts and the reporting trend also massively goes up for non-climate causes!
- Other biases might inflate the number of reported disasters. E.g., governments of poor countries have an incentive to declare more disasters with increasing international relief.¹⁰
- Using obviously problematic disaster frequency reporting instead of direct climatological evidence to try and show increasing climate danger is a revealing choice by catastrophists. They are making it because the climate change we’ve experienced has been very modest—and masterable.
Do Not Declare a “Climate Emergency”
·AUGUST 17, 2023Read full story - An example of unalarming climate fundamentals: neither the frequency nor the energy in global hurricanes has changed significantly relative to the noisy average. There is also little evidence for more landfalling hurricanes.¹¹
- The catastrophist attempt to undermine the 98% decrease in disaster deaths by pointing to the increased reporting of disasters is actually self-defeating.
If disaster deaths are plummeting despite incomplete past reporting, that means they’ve declined by even more than 98%.
- Myth 5: Climate damages are drastically increasing, revealing an underlying climate emergency.
Truth: Even though there are many incentives for climate damages to go up—preferences for riskier areas, government bailouts—GDP-adjusted damages are flat.¹²
- We often hear that “billion-dollar disasters” have increased significantly. But this is a bogus metric. Of course, as GDP grows we’ll have more billion-dollar disasters because there is more wealth for disasters to strike. But when we adjust for GDP there’s no increase in damage.¹³
- A Reuters “fact check” alarmingly claims a 151% growth in disaster damages from a period starting in 1978 to a period ending in 2017.
But they evade that the global economy grew by over 200% during that period!
(And they evade that disaster and damage reporting increased.)¹⁴
- The stupidest climate safety denial myth (used by The New York Times): 2 million people died from extreme weather in the last 50 years; that’s obviously an emergency.
Truth: 2 million in 50 years is a rate of 40,000 per year—far, far less than 100 years ago, thus confirming today’s climate safety.¹⁵
- The last-gasp climate safety denial myth: Okay, we’re safer than ever from climate disasters, and it is driven by cheap energy from fossil fuels, but we can easily replace fossil fuels with solar and wind.
Truth: For the foreseeable future there is no cheap global energy without fossil fuels.
The ultimate debunking of “solar and wind are cheaper than fossil fuels.”
·JULY 19, 2023Read full story - Observe that all these seemingly scientific outlets, such as The New York Times, Reuters, and PolitiFact are totally unable to refute the death-blow to their “climate emergency” narrative that is the drastic decline in climate disaster deaths.
Science requires that they admit defeat.
Popular links
- EnergyTalkingPoints.com: Hundreds of concise, powerful, well-referenced talking points on energy, environmental, and climate issues.
- My new book Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas—Not Less.
- Speaking and media inquiries.
“Energy Talking Points by Alex Epstein” is my free Substack newsletter designed to give as many people as possible access to concise, powerful, well-referenced talking points on the latest energy, environmental, and climate issues from a pro-human, pro-energy perspective.
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UC San Diego – The Keeling Curve
For every million people on earth, annual deaths from climate-related causes (extreme temperature, drought, flood, storms, wildfires) declined 98%–from an average of 247 per year during the 1920s to 2.5 per year during the 2010s.
Data on disaster deaths come from EM-DAT, CRED / UCLouvain, Brussels, Belgium – www.emdat.be (D. Guha-Sapir).
Population estimates for the 1920s from the Maddison Database 2010, the Groningen Growth and Development Centre, Faculty of Economics and Business at University of Groningen. For years not shown, population is assumed to have grown at a steady rate.
Population estimates for the 2010s come from World Bank Data
From the Canadian Taxpayers Federation
By Ryan Thorpe
The cost of administering the federal carbon tax and rebate scheme has risen to $283 million since it was imposed in 2019, according to government records obtained by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
By 2030, the cost of administering the carbon tax is expected to total $796 million, according to the records.
“Not only does the carbon tax make our gas, heating and groceries more expensive, but taxpayers are also hit with a big bill to fund Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s battalion of carbon tax bureaucrats,” said Franco Terrazzano, CTF Federal Director. “Trudeau should make life more affordable and slash the cost of the bureaucracy by scrapping the carbon tax.”
The government records were released in response to an order paper question from Conservative MP John Barlow (Foothills).
The carbon tax and rebate scheme cost taxpayers $84 million in 2023, according to the records.
There were 461 federal bureaucrats tasked with administering the carbon tax and rebate scheme last year, according to the records.
The CTF previously reported administering the carbon tax cost taxpayers $199 million between 2019 and 2022.
Projected costs for administering the carbon tax and rebate scheme between 2024 and 2030 are $513 million, according to the records.
That would bring total administration costs for the carbon tax and rebate scheme up to $796 million by 2030.
But the true hit to taxpayers is even higher, as the records do not include costs associated with the Fuel Charge Tax Credit for Farmers or the Canada Carbon Rebate for Small Businesses.
“It’s magic math to believe the feds can raise taxes, skim hundreds-of-millions off the top to hire hundreds of new bureaucrats and then somehow make everyone better off with rebates,” Terrazzano said.
The carbon tax will cost the average household up to $399 this year more than the rebates, according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, the government’s independent, non-partisan budget watchdog.
The PBO also notes that, “Canada’s own emissions are not large enough to materially impact climate change.”
The government also charges its GST on top of the carbon tax. The PBO report shows this carbon tax-on-tax will cost taxpayers $400 million this year. That money isn’t rebated back to Canadians.
The carbon tax currently costs 17 cents per litre of gasoline, 21 cents per litre of diesel and 15 cents per cubic metre of natural gas.
By 2030, the carbon tax will cost 37 cents per litre of gasoline, 45 cents per litre of diesel and 32 cents per cubic metre of natural gas.
Economy
COP 29 leaders demand over a $1 trillion a year in climate reparations from ‘wealthy’ nations. They don’t deserve a nickel.
COP 29 is calling for over $1 trillion in annual climate reparations
- A major theme of COP 29 is that the world should set a “New Collective Quantified Goal” wherein successful nations pay poor nations over $1 trillion a year to 1) make up for climate-related harm and 2) build them new “green energy” economies. In other words, climate reparations.¹
- What would $1 trillion a year in climate reparations mean for you and your family?Assuming the money was paid equally by households considered high income (>$50 per day), your household would have to pay more than $5,000 a year in climate reparations taxes!²
- Climate reparations are based on two false assumptions:1. Free, wealthy countries, through their fossil fuel use, have made the world worse for poor countries.
2. The poor world’s main problem is dealing with climate change, which wealth transfers will help them with.
But free, fossil-fueled countries have made life better for poor countries
- Free, wealthy countries, through their fossil fuel use, have not made the world worse for poor countries—they have made it far, far better.Observe what has happened to global life expectancies and income as fossil fuel use has risen. Life has gotten much better for everyone.³
- The wealthy world’s fossil fuel use has improved life worldwide because by using fossil fuel energy to be incredibly productive, we have 1) made all kinds of goods cheaper and 2) been able to engage in life-saving aid, particularly in the realms of food, medicine, and sanitation.
- Without the historic use of fossil fuels by the wealthy world, there would be no super-productive agriculture to feed 8 billion humans, no satellite-based weather warning systems, etc. Most of the individuals in poor countries would not even be alive today.
Free, fossil-fueled countries have made the poor safer from climate
- The wealthy world’s fossil fuel use has been particularly beneficial in the realm of climate.Over the last 100 years, the death rate from climate-related disasters plummeted by 98% globally.
A big reason is millions of lives saved from drought via fossil-fueled crop transport.⁴
- The “climate reparations” movement ignores the fact that the wealthy world’s fossil fuel use has made life better, including safer from climate, in the poor world.This allows it to pretend that the poor world’s main problem is dealing with rising CO2 levels.
The poor world’s problem is poverty, not rising CO2 levels
- The poor world’s main problem is not rising CO2 levels, it is poverty—which is caused by lack of freedom, including the crucial freedom to use fossil fuels.Poverty makes everything worse, including the world’s massive natural climate danger and any danger from more CO2.
- While it’s not true that the wealthy world has increased climate danger in the poor world—we have reduced it—it is true that the poor world is more endangered by climate than the wealthy world is.The solution is for the poor to get rich. Which requires freedom and fossil fuels.⁵
Escaping poverty requires freedom and fossil fuels
- Every nation that has risen out of poverty has done so via pro-freedom policies—specifically, economic freedom.
That’s how resource-poor places like Singapore and Taiwan became prosperous. Resource-rich places like Congo have struggled due to lack of economic freedom.
- Even China, which is unfree in many ways (including insufficient protections against pollution) dramatically increased its standard of living via economic freedom—particularly in the realm of industrial development where it is now in many ways much freer than the US and Europe.
- A crucial freedom involved in rising prosperity has been the freedom to use fossil fuels.Fossil fuels are a uniquely cost-effective source of energy, providing energy that’s low-cost, reliable, versatile, and scalable to billions of people in thousands of places.⁶
- Time and again nations have increased their prosperity, including their safety from climate, via economic freedom and fossil fuels.Observe the 7X increase in fossil fuel use in China and India over the past 4 decades, which enabled them to industrialize and prosper.⁷
- For the world’s poorest people to be more prosperous and safer from climate, they need more freedom and more fossil fuels.The “climate reparations” movement seeks to deny them both.
- The wealthy world should communicate to the poor world that economic freedom is the path to prosperity, and encourage the poor world to reform its cultural and political institutions to embrace economic freedom—including fossil fuel freedom.Our leaders are doing the opposite.
Climate reparations pay off dictators to take away fossil fuel freedom
- Instead of promoting economic freedom, including fossil fuel freedom, wealthy climate reparations advocates like Antonio Guterres are offering to entrench anti-freedom regimes by paying off their dictators and bureaucrats to eliminate fossil fuel freedom.This is disgusting.⁸
- The biggest victim of “climate reparations” will be the world’s poorest countries, whose dictators will be paid off to prevent the fossil fuel freedom that has allowed not just the US and Europe but also China and India to dramatically increase their prosperity.
- The biggest beneficiary of “climate reparations” will be China, which is already emitting more CO2 than the US and Europe combined. (Though less per capita.)While we flagellate and cripple ourselves, China will use fossil fuels in its quest to become the world’s superpower.⁹
- The second biggest beneficiary of “climate reparations” will be corrupt do-gooders who get to add anti-fossil-fuel strings to “reparations” dollars and dictate how it’s spent—which will surely include lots of dollars for unreliable solar panels and wind turbines made in China.
Leaders must reject reparations and champion fossil fuel freedom
- We need leaders in the US and Europe who proudly:1. Champion the free world’s use of fossil fuels as an enormous good for the world, including its climate safety.
2. Encourage the poor world to embrace economic freedom and fossil fuels.
Tell your Representative to do both.
Popular links
- EnergyTalkingPoints.com: Hundreds of concise, powerful, well-referenced talking points on energy, environmental, and climate issues.
- My new book Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas—Not Less.
- Speaking and media inquiries
“Energy Talking Points by Alex Epstein” is my free Substack newsletter designed to give as many people as possible access to concise, powerful, well-referenced talking points on the latest energy, environmental, and climate issues from a pro-human, pro-energy perspective.
Share Energy Talking Points by Alex Epstein
1 Scientific American – COP27 Summit Yields ‘Historic Win’ for Climate Reparations but Falls Short on Emissions Reductions
Phys.org – COP29 climate finance deal ‘must cover loss and damage,’ experts urge
COP29 official website – Fund for responding to Loss and Damage ready to accept contributions
2 Global population was about 8.02 billion in 2023.
About 7% of world population are considered high income, which translates into about 562 million individuals. Considering 3 people per average household in high income households, this translates into about 187 million households.
Pew Research – Are you in the global middle class? Find out with our income calculator
$1 trillion per annum paid by 187 million households means the average household would pay about $5,300 per year.
3 Maddison Database 2010 at the Groningen Growth and Development Centre, Faculty of Economics and Business at University of Groningen
4 UC San Diego – The Keeling Curve
For every million people on earth, annual deaths from climate-related causes (extreme temperature, drought, flood, storms, wildfires) declined 98%–from an average of 247 per year during the 1920s to 2.5 in per year during the 2010s.
Data on disaster deaths come from EM-DAT, CRED / UCLouvain, Brussels, Belgium – www.emdat.be (D. Guha-Sapir).
Population estimates for the 1920s from the Maddison Database 2010, the Groningen Growth and Development Centre, Faculty of Economics and Business at University of Groningen. For years not shown, population is assumed to have grown at a steady rate.
Population estimates for the 2010s come from World Bank Data.
5 UC San Diego – The Keeling Curve
Data on disaster deaths come from EM-DAT, CRED / UCLouvain, Brussels, Belgium – www.emdat.be (D. Guha-Sapir).
Population estimates come from World Bank Data.
6 Our World in Data – Energy Production and Consumption
7 BP – Statistical Review of World Energy
8 UN News – ‘Pay up or humanity will pay the price’, Guterres warns at COP29 climate summit
9 Our World in Data – Annual CO₂ emissions from fossil fuels, by world region
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