Despite what activists say, the planet is not on fire

Nearly half of young Canadians surveyed in a 2022 study said they believed humanity is doomed because of climate change, while more than three-quarters said they were frightened. No wonder. They have grown up bombarded both by footage of natural disasters, not just in Canada but around the world, and by activists’ claims that climate change is making the planet unliveable. But that’s just wrong.

The ubiquity of phone cameras and our ability to instantly communicate mean — the “CNN effect” — that the media can show more weather disasters now than ever before. But that doesn’t mean the disasters are deadlier or costlier.

As we saw in the first article in this series, deaths from climate-related disasters have dropped precipitously. On average in the 1870s five million people a year died from such disasters. A century ago, about half a million people a year did. In the past decade, however, the death toll worldwide was fewer than 10,000 people a year. As global population has more than quintupled, disaster deaths have declined 500-fold. And this dramatic decline is true for all major disaster categories, including floods, flash floods, cold waves and wind disasters, and for rich and poor countries alike. But you never hear about that during disaster reporting.

Floods are the most costly and frequent Canadian disasters. But the common claim that flood costs are rising dramatically ignores the obvious fact that when a flood plain has many more houses on it than decades ago and the houses are worth much more then the same flood will cause a lot more damage. We need to keep these changes in mind and measure costs in proportion to GDP. Even the UN says that’s how to measure whether cities and towns are safer.

Though peer-reviewed analysis for Canada is lacking there is plenty to draw on elsewhere. As so often, the U.S. has the most comprehensive data. It shows that while flood costs have increased in absolute terms, that’s only because more people and property are in harm’s way. In the country’s worst year for flooding, 1913, damage exceeded two per cent of GDP, though the yearly average in that era was 0.5 per cent. Today it’s less than 0.05 per cent of GDP — just a tenth what it was a century ago.

We know adaptation makes disasters much less threatening over time. Consider sea level rise, which threatens to flood coastal zones around the world. A much-cited study shows that at the turn of this century an average of 3.4 million people a year experienced coastal flooding, with $11 billion in annual damages. At the same time, around $13 billion or 0.05 per cent of global GDP was spent on coastal defences.

By the end of this century, more people will be in harm’s way, and climate change could raise sea levels by as much as a metre. If we don’t improve coastal defences, vast areas will be routinely inundated, flooding 187 million people and causing $55 trillion in annual damages, more than five per cent of global GDP in 2100. This finding does routinely make headlines.

But it ignores adaptation, which research shows will cost much less. On average, countries will avoid flood damage by spending just 0.005 per cent of GDP. Even with higher sea levels, far fewer people will be flooded — by 2100 just 15,000 people a year. Even the combined cost of adaptation and damage will be just 0.008 per cent of GDP.

Enormously ambitious emissions-reduction policies costing hundreds of trillions of dollars could cut the number of people flooded at century’s end from that 15,000 number down to about 10,000 per year. But notice the difference: Adaptation reduces the number currently being flooded by almost 3.4 million and avoids another 184 million people being flooded annually by 2100. At best, climate policy can save just 0.005 million.

We often hear that the “world is on fire” because of climate change. New Liberal leader Mark Carney repeated that in his acceptance speech Sunday. And it’s true that in 2023 more of Canada’s surface area burned than in any year since 1970, with climate change probably partly to blame. Even so, two points need to be kept in mind.

First, most studies projecting an increase in wildfires ignore adaptation. In fact, humans don’t like fire and make great efforts to reduce it, which is why since 1900 humanity has seen less burned area, not more. The data from last century involve historical reconstruction but since 1997, NASA satellites have tracked all significant fires. The record shows a dramatic fall in global burned area. Last year it was the second lowest, and in 2022 the lowest ever. And studies find that with adaptation the area burned will keep falling, even without climate action.

Second, reducing emissions is a terribly inefficient way to help. Studies by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency show that even drastic cuts in emissions would reduce the burned area only slightly this century. Simpler, cheaper, faster policies like better forest management, prescribed fires and cleaning out undergrowth can help much more.

The flood of disaster porn is terrifying our kids and skewing our perception, and that can only lead to bad climate policy.

Bjørn Lomborg

Related Topics:#BjornLomborg #FraserInstitute #GlobalWarming climatechange PlanetNotOnFire

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Net zero’s cost-benefit ratio is crazy high

Published on April 22, 2025

Todayville

From the Fraser Institute

By Bjørn Lomborg

The best academic estimates show that over the century, policies to achieve net zero would cost every person on Earth the equivalent of more than CAD $4,000 every year. Of course, most people in poor countries cannot afford anywhere near this. If the cost falls solely on the rich world, the price-tag adds up to almost $30,000 (CAD) per person, per year, over the century.

Canada has made a legal commitment to achieve “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050. Back in 2015, then-Prime Minister Trudeau promised that climate action will “create jobs and economic growth” and the federal government insists it will create a “strong economy.” The truth is that the net zero policy generates vast costs and very little benefit—and Canada would be better off changing direction.

Achieving net zero carbon emissions is far more daunting than politicians have ever admitted. Canada is nowhere near on track. Annual Canadian CO₂ emissions have increased 20 per cent since 1990. In the time that Trudeau was prime minister, fossil fuel energy supply actually increased over 11 per cent. Similarly, the share of fossil fuels in Canada’s total energy supply (not just electricity) increased from 75 per cent in 2015 to 77 per cent in 2023.

Over the same period, the switch from coal to gas, and a tiny 0.4 percentage point increase in the energy from solar and wind, has reduced annual CO₂ emissions by less than three per cent. On that trend, getting to zero won’t take 25 years as the Liberal government promised, but more than 160 years. One study shows that the government’s current plan which won’t even reach net-zero will cost Canada a quarter of a million jobs, seven per cent lower GDP and wages on average $8,000 lower.

Globally, achieving net-zero will be even harder. Remember, Canada makes up about 1.5 per cent of global CO₂ emissions, and while Canada is already rich with plenty of energy, the world’s poor want much more energy.

In order to achieve global net-zero by 2050, by 2030 we would already need to achieve the equivalent of removing the combined emissions of China and the United States — every year. This is in the realm of science fiction.

The painful Covid lockdowns of 2020 only reduced global emissions by about six per cent. To achieve net zero, the UN points out that we would need to have doubled those reductions in 2021, tripled them in 2022, quadrupled them in 2023, and so on. This year they would need to be sextupled, and by 2030 increased 11-fold. So far, the world hasn’t even managed to start reducing global carbon emissions, which last year hit a new record.

Data from both the International Energy Agency and the US Energy Information Administration give added cause for skepticism. Both organizations foresee the world getting more energy from renewables: an increase from today’s 16 per cent to between one-quarter to one-third of all primary energy by 2050. But that is far from a transition. On an optimistically linear trend, this means we’re a century or two away from achieving 100 percent renewables.

Politicians like to blithely suggest the shift away from fossil fuels isn’t unprecedented, because in the past we transitioned from wood to coal, from coal to oil, and from oil to gas. The truth is, humanity hasn’t made a real energy transition even once. Coal didn’t replace wood but mostly added to global energy, just like oil and gas have added further additional energy. As in the past, solar and wind are now mostly adding to our global energy output, rather than replacing fossil fuels.

Indeed, it’s worth remembering that even after two centuries, humanity’s transition away from wood is not over. More than two billion mostly poor people still depend on wood for cooking and heating, and it still provides about 5 per cent of global energy.

Like Canada, the world remains fossil fuel-based, as it delivers more than four-fifths of energy. Over the last half century, our dependence has declined only slightly from 87 per cent to 82 per cent, but in absolute terms we have increased our fossil fuel use by more than 150 per cent. On the trajectory since 1971, we will reach zero fossil fuel use some nine centuries from now, and even the fastest period of recent decline from 2014 would see us taking over three centuries.

Global warming will create more problems than benefits, so achieving net-zero would see real benefits. Over the century, the average person would experience benefits worth $700 (CAD) each year.

But net zero policies will be much more expensive. The best academic estimates show that over the century, policies to achieve net zero would cost every person on Earth the equivalent of more than CAD $4,000 every year. Of course, most people in poor countries cannot afford anywhere near this. If the cost falls solely on the rich world, the price-tag adds up to almost $30,000 (CAD) per person, per year, over the century.

Every year over the 21st century, costs would vastly outweigh benefits, and global costs would exceed benefits by over CAD 32 trillion each year.

We would see much higher transport costs, higher electricity costs, higher heating and cooling costs and — as businesses would also have to pay for all this — drastic increases in the price of food and all other necessities. Just one example: net-zero targets would likely increase gas costs some two-to-four times even by 2030, costing consumers up to $US52.6 trillion. All that makes it a policy that just doesn’t make sense—for Canada and for the world.