Spending trillions on enormous and premature emissions cuts is an unsustainable and ineffective Western world approach
Across the world, politicians are going out of their way to promise fantastically expensive climate policies.
U.S. President Joe Biden has promised to spend US$500 billion ($630 billion) each year on climate — about 13 per cent of total federal revenue. The European Union will spend 25 per cent of its budget on climate.
Most rich countries now promise to go carbon-neutral by mid-century. Shockingly, only one country has made a serious, independent estimate of the cost: New Zealand found, optimistically, that it would cost 16 per cent of its GDP by then, equivalent to the entire current New Zealand budget.
The equivalent cost for the EU and the United States would be more than US$5 trillion. Each and every year. That is more than the entire U.S. federal budget, or more than E.U. governments spend across all budgets for education, recreation, housing, environment, economic affairs, police, courts, defence and health.
We are incessantly being told that renewables are ever cheaper and that a transition to green energy will make us richer. Yet this facile argument is belied by reality.
For the rest of this column: https://financialpost.com/opinion/opinion-spend-billions-on-green-innovation-not-trillions-on-carbon-cutting