Global warming proposals would incur far higher costs than almost any electorate is willing to pay

See It’s Cheaper to Talk than to Cut Emissions by Bjørn Lomborg. Excerpts:

"Achieving net-zero emissions wouldn’t just cost a little more than people are willing to pay, but an order of magnitude more. The main economic models assessing the European Union’s plan to reduce emissions by “merely” 80% by 2050, for example, estimate average annual costs of at least $1.4 trillion. And Mexico’s relatively unambitious pledge to cut its emissions by 50% by 2050 will likely cost 7-15% of GDP.

A report commissioned by New Zealand’s government to study its promise of carbon neutrality by 2050 found that the annual cost of meeting this target in 2050 and each subsequent year would be higher than the country’s entire current annual budget. Moreover, this estimate assumes that policies are implemented as efficiently as possible. In reality, no government manages to do that – so the cost of becoming carbon neutral could easily double. (The New Zealand government is steaming ahead with its policy regardless.)

The costs of deep emissions cuts are so high because we are all utterly reliant on fossil fuels. Green-energy alternatives, including solar and wind, are generally not ready to compete. As a result, policies forcing people and businesses to shift to immature technologies will slow growth and exacerbate energy poverty.

This is also why the world is much further behind in its “energy transition” than most people realize. Solar and wind together currently deliver about 1% of global energy, and the International Energy Agency estimates this will reach only 4.1% by 2040. Vaclav Smil, who is Bill Gates’s favorite energy expert, says that “claims of a rapid transition to a zero-carbon society are plain nonsense,” adding that “even a greatly accelerated shift towards renewables would not be able to relegate fossil fuels to minority contributors to the global energy supply anytime soon, certainly not by 2050.”

Many of today’s panicky political declarations and climate protests are driven by the widespread belief that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) told us we have just 12 years left to save the planet. This is at best a fundamental misunderstanding of what the IPCC said. The panel was asked to establish which policies would be needed to achieve the nearly impossible target of keeping temperature rises under 1.5°C. The IPCC answered that this would indeed be almost impossible, requiring a total economic transformation in 12 years.

 In fact, the IPCC’s last major report said that if we do nothing to stop climate change, the impact will be equivalent to a reduction in overall incomes of 0.2-2% by the 2070s – similar to the effect of one economic recession."