The poor are carrying the cost of today's climate policies

From Matt Ridley.

"Here is a simple fact about the world today:

• climate change is doing more good than harm.

Here is another fact:

• climate change policy is doing more harm than good."

"The biggest way in which CO2 emissions do good is through global greening. Ranga Myneni and colleagues (Zaichun et al. 2016) recently published evidence derived from satellite data showing that 25 to 50% of the vegetated parts of the planet has grown greener and just 4% browner, and that 70% of the greening can be attributed to an increased level of CO2. The overall increase in green vegetation, which has occurred in all kinds of habitats – from the tropics to the Arctic, from deserts to farmland – is now estimated to be 14% during the last 30 years. This startling fact is confirmed by multiple other lines of evidence: tree growth rates; free-air concentration experiments in which the CO2 level is enhanced over crops and natural habitats; increases in the amplitude of the CO2 changes in the Northern Hemisphere each year; and so on.

Dr Zaichun Zhu from Peking University, the lead author of the Myneni paper (2016), described these results as follows: ‘The greening over the past 33 years reported in this study is equivalent to adding a green continent about two times the size of mainland USA (18 million km2), and has the ability to fundamentally change the cycling of water and carbon in the climate system.’"

"if there is 14% more vegetation on the planet than 30 years ago, and 70% of this can be directly attributed to CO2 fertilisation, this means there is more food for humans, animals, microbes, and fungi, and less land is needed to grow human food. Therefore, more land is available for nature than would otherwise have been the case if we had not raised CO2 levels. It means richer biodiversity and less drought. It means lower food prices and less starvation. It means richer rainforests and less desert.

For many years, Dr Craig Idso has been quietly and systematically collating the evidence as to how much faster crops have grown as a result of the CO2 increase, detailing the many experiments that show very clearly that a higher CO2 level makes plants more resistant to droughts – because they need to open their pores less and they lose less water as a result (Idso & Idso 2011). He has estimated the increased value of the world’s crops as a result of the CO2 fertilisation effect – over 30 years this increase comes to US$3.2 trillion (Idso 2013). That’s $3,200,000,000,000."

Climate change policies 

The policies designed to slow global warming, meanwhile, have huge costs. Let me walk you through the details in case you are doubtful. Here are ten examples of the harm done by policies designed to solve the problem of climate change.

1. Ethanol subsidies 

Ethanol subsidies in the United States, Brazil and in Europe were introduced specifically and explicitly to reduce CO2 emissions. Yet they did environmental harm. As Bloomberg (2016) reports:
The Natural Resources Defense Council used a 96-page report in 2004 to proclaim boundless biofuel benefits: slashed global warming emissions, improved air quality and more wildlife habitat. Instead, farmers ploughed millions of acres of prairie grasses to grow corn for making ethanol, with fertilizer runoff contributing to a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. Scientists warned that carbon dioxide emissions associated with corn-based ethanol were higher than expected.

And they did very little if anything to reduce emissions.

Ethanol has now displaced a bit more than 0.5% of world oil use. This ethanol conversion consumes about 5% of the world’s grain crop, which in turn raises food prices. The United Nations (UN) Food and Agriculture Organization produced a report concluding it was one of the main reasons that the price of food shot up in 2008, and stayed high for some years afterwards until harvests began to catch up, worsening malnutrition and starvation, and encouraging the destruction of rain- forest to cultivate more land. The policy of ethanol subsidies steals land from nature. Worse, it steals food from poor people and puts it in rich people’s cars.

Indur Goklany has estimated that this policy kills almost 200,000 people a year (Bryce 2010). As a farm owner, I probably benefit a little bit from these programmes, so I have no vested interest in criticising them. But that’s not going to stop me."


2. Biodiesel programmes 

Biodiesel programmes for making motor fuel from palm oil in the tropics, and from rapeseed oil in Europe, are all subsidised by the European Union specifically to reduce emissions, but they actually increase them. Transport & Environment, a green group, has calculated that by 2020, biodiesel will increase emissions from transport by 4% compared with using fossil-diesel, equivalent to putting an extra 12 million cars to the road (Gosden 2016). The subsidies also encourage the destruction of rainforest and the cultivation of land that would otherwise be available to nature. As a farm owner, I probably benefit slightly from this harmful policy."