In preparation for the signing of the Paris climate treaty Friday (Earth Day), 16 religious organizations presented an “Interfaith Climate Change Statement” to the United Nations in New York today.

The 724-word statement urges heads of state to sign and ratify (Do they know the difference? In the U.S., the “head of state” can only propose, not ratify, a treaty. Without Senate ratification, President Obama’s signature won’t bind the United States.) the Paris climate treaty, claiming “Humanity … must begin a transition away from polluting fossil fuels and towards clean renewable energy sources” to keep global average temperature from rising more than 1.5C compared with pre-Industrial times (of which about 0.8–0.9C has already happened) by “peaking global emissions” of carbon dioxide in 2020 and “a transition to 100 per cent renewable energies by 2050.”

One group promoting the statement, Climate Nexus, posted a video to its YouTube channel that claims “We must reduce emissions to stop global temperature rise” and urges political leaders to sign the Paris treaty to achieve that.

That is both naive and absurd.

Assuming the IPCC’s climate modeling (MAGICC 6.3 [Meinshausen, Raper & Wigley, 2011], the latest version of the model used in all five IPCC assessment reports, which probably exaggerates CO2’s warming effect and therefore the cooling effect of emission reductions), full implementation (which is extremely unlikely) of the Paris climate treaty from now through the end of this century would not “stop global temperature rise” or even come close. The most optimistic implementation scenario would reduce global average temperature at the end of this century by 0.17C, from a projected increase of about 4.67C to about 4.5C. (To understand why, read “Impact of Current Climate Proposals,” in the peer-reviewed journal Global Policy, vol. 7, issue 1, pages 109–118, February 2016.) One can only assume that the religious leaders who put together the “Interfaith Climate Change Statement” are completely unaware of the relevant scientific, technological, and economic facts.

As for a “transition to 100 per cent renewable energies by 2050,” that pipedream certainly isn’t going to happen—and we should be glad it won’t.

As I pointed out in “Bishops Urge Decarbonizing the World’s Energy Systems—Really?” last fall in Christian Post, summarizing the findings of a major study by Stanford University’s Mark Z. Jacobson and U.C. Davis’s Mark A. Delucchi, environmental scholar Ronald Bailey, in The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-first Century, points out that powering only the United States with only wind, water, and solar power “would require 590,000 5-megawatt wind turbines, 110,000 wave devices, 830 geothermal plants, 140 new hydroelectric dams, 7,600 tidal turbines, 265 million rooftop solar photovoltaic systems, 6,200 300-megawatt solar photovoltaic power plants, and 7,600 300-megawatt concentrated solar power plants.”

Total cost? Just for the wind and solar parts, $13–$25 trillion. Spread over 35 years that’s $2,589 to $4,979 per household per year, or $90,624 to $174,277 per household for the period.

“Taking the Jacobson and Delucchi figures for the world,” Bailey writes, “the total cost to completely eliminate fossil fuels by 2030 would amount to $100 trillion—that is to say, 8 percent of global annual GDP. The global cost per household per year would amount to $3,571.”

I suspect that figure is far too low compared with the costs just for the U.S., probably because it assumes per capita energy consumption, and therefore health and prosperity, far below current U.S. levels.

“The nearly 3 billion people who live on less than $2,000 per year,” Bailey observes, “simply cannot pay the prices needed to deploy current versions of renewable power technologies.”

The trillions of dollars required to achieve the immeasurably small 0.017C reduction in global average temperature would do far more good if spent on ensuring pure drinking water, sewage sanitation, infectious disease control, and other direct assistance to human health in developing countries. It follows that the Paris treaty actually harms the world’s poor rather than helping them.

For much better-informed statements by hundreds of Christian religious leaders, scientists, and economists, see “An Open Letter to Pope Francis on Climate Change” or  “An Open Letter on Climate Change to the People, their Local Representatives, the State Legislatures and Governors, the Congress, and the President of the United States of America.” These are supported by the research reported in “A Call to Truth, Prudence, and Protection of the Poor 2014: The Case against Harmful Climate Policies Gets Stronger,” which includes strong evidence that the actual warming effect of added CO2 is much less than what the IPCC has claimed—probably in the range of 1/2 to 1/6—which entails that the cooling effect of the CO2 emission reductions in the Paris treaty will also be much smaller, i.e., instead of 0.17C, something in the range of 0.028 to 0.085C.

The “Interfaith Climate Change Statement” and its presentation were facilitated by GreenFaith in joint collaboration with ACT Alliance, Bhumi Project, Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual University, Catholic Earthcare Australia, Eco-Sikh, Elijah Interfaith Institute, Global Buddhist Climate Change Collective, Global Catholic Climate Movement, Islamic Relief Worldwide, Lutheran World Federation, Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, Plum Village Community of Engaged Buddhists, United Religions Initiative, and World Council of Churches.