In the debate over climate change, as in most things, it makes sense for politicians to appeal to a higher power. To wit: President Obama recently sent Environment Protection Agency administrator Gina McCarthy to visit the Vatican. Her mission was to convince papal officials, who are currently drafting a climate-change-focused encyclical for Pope Francis, that the president’s anti-climate change policies will help the poor and are thus a blueprint for similar international efforts.
Hopefully Pope Francis and the Vatican Curia took Ms. McCarthy’s claims with a grain of salt. The poor will be—and in some cases, already are—the first to suffer from such policies.
The premise of all anti-climate change policies is that we must drastically reduce global carbon emissions. This can only be achieved by drastically reducing consumption of fossil fuels—oil, coal, and natural gas—which emit carbon emissions when they are used to generate electricity or consumer products.
But fossil fuels are the best energy sources on Earth. They have powered the economic progress of the past 250 years, during which time global poverty decreased like never before in human history.
This economic progress played out similarly across the globe. Since the Industrial Revolution, non-industrial nations have always begun the transition to industrial societies—and ultimately wealth societies—by using fossil fuels. Why? Because they are the cheapest, the most abundant, and the most reliable energy sources on the planet. Given their natural qualities, fossil fuels can power more and faster economic growth than any known alternative.
This process is still playing out before our eyes. China, India, and developing countries from Asia to Africa disproportionately rely on fossil fuels. Not coincidentally, these countries have seen the largest declines in poverty in the past 50 years. Their use of fossil fuels directly correlates with increased economic well-being for more and more people.
Which puts President Obama’s policies—and his desire for other countries to mimic them—into perspective. By arguing that countries should limit their fossil fuel usage, he is implicitly arguing that developing nations should deny their citizens the economic progress that Americans and citizens of other wealthy western nation have enjoyed.
Unsurprisingly, no developing country has voluntarily stifled its own economic growth by abandoning or limiting fossil fuel usage. This has left European nations and America to try and “lead the way.”
Yet even here, all is not well. Wealthy countries like America are already demonstrating how anti-fossil fuels policies harm the poor.
Last year, President Obama’s EPA proposed the “Clean Power Plan,” which would limit carbon dioxide emissions by 30 percent over the next 15 years. According to a recent study, this one regulation could raise Americans’ electricity bills by a total of $366 billion. Residents in 43 states would see double-digit rate increases every single year during this span. Consumers and businesses could face a combined $41 billion in additional energy costs every year, which is the equivalent of 760,000 middle-class incomes.
This disproportionately harms the least fortunate. Americans making less than $10,000 spend, on average, 78 percent of their income on energy-related costs. The rich, by comparison, only spend 9 percent of their income on energy. So when energy becomes more expensive—as it must when cheap fossil fuels are replaced by expensive alternatives—the poor stand to lose the most.
This begs the question: If limiting fossil fuel usage is so disastrous for the poor, how can Obama, through EPA administrator Gina McCarthy, claim to the Vatican that his policies help the least fortunate?
This argument rests on the assumption that preventing climate change will protect the poor from rising seas, worsening droughts, and the extreme climate events that are allegedly linked to global warming. This claim is false on two counts.
First: Global warming cannot be prevented without upending the world economy. Take the example of the EPA’s Clean Power Plan. For all its economic harm, it is still only expected to reduce global temperatures by just 0.02 degrees and slow sea level rise by all of 0.01 inch by the year 2100. America could cut its carbon emissions to zero—an impossible task—and global temperatures would still decline by only 0.18 degrees in the same timeframe.
Which points to an uncomfortable reality: In order to fully combat climate, the entire world would have to return to a pre-industrial state. No one can argue that the poor would be better off in such a world.
Second: Preventing climate change isn’t the most effective way to protect the poor. The better option is economic progress. Fewer and fewer people die from natural disasters every year because they develop the infrastructure and the technology to defend against hurricanes, tornadoes, and other extreme climate events. Continued innovation is the best way to ensure that climate change harms the fewest people possible.
But that won’t happen if Obama and likeminded policymakers across the globe succeed in their attempts to radically reduce carbon emissions, nor will it be happen if Pope Francis condones such policies in his upcoming encyclical, set to be released in June. The world’s poor deserve to be given a chance at a better life as well as protection from climate change—but limiting fossil fuel usage will accomplish neither goal.
