This is the fourth and last in a series of answers to a common, popular defense of drastic measures to combat manmade global warming. For the first, click here; for the second, click here; and for the third, click here.

Bob’s final argument was this: “On the other hand, if climate change isn’t our fault but we choose to act like it is, we still end up with a world less polluted and more enjoyable. And we will have done everything we can to protect the creation we have been made stewards of. I don’t see a downside.”

But the exact opposite is far more likely, for many reasons, four of which follow.

First, all the prescriptions for reducing anthropogenic global warming bring with them slower economic growth in developing countries—and some run the risk or stopping or even reversing economic growth, both there and in developed countries. But remember the environmental Kuznets curve. If we slow economic growth, we prolong the high pollution emission rates of early industrialization. (And if we prohibit early industrialization, we condemn people to poverty, and the high rates of disease and premature death that invariably accompany it, that no American or European today would accept.) That means efforts to curb global warming could actually make the world a much more polluted place than otherwise.

Second, one of the great benefits of fossil fuels is that they move from the surface of the earth to deep inside it a great deal of the destructive activity involved in providing the vast amounts of energy necessary to provide decent lives for billions of people. Take a look at the graphic below (from Robert Bryce’s book Power Hungry: The Myths of “Green” Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future), showing the different amounts of land surface needed to generate 2700 megawatts of electricity. Wind and solar require many times as much as coal, oil, and natural gas (let alone nuclear, the best). If we care about maintaining habitat for other species, we should want to minimize how much land we use to generate energy.

Third, life-cycle assessment of the pollutant effects of wind and solar energy generation indicate that they are by no means environmentally entirely friendly—or even, more friendly than fossil fuels. The mining and refining of rare-earth metals essential to their construction, done mostly in developing countries (especially China), results in horrific toxic pollution that costs thousands and thousands of lives. Most of those refined materials cannot be easily recycled when the turbines or solar panels reach the end of useful life, so they wind up in landfills, leaching their chemicals into groundwater where those landfills aren’t properly designed to prevent the leaching (which is common in developing countries). This doesn’t even mention the millions of birds and bats killed by the wind turbines.

Fourth, one clear downside of attempting to reduce global warming by implementing the Paris climate agreement is that it would cost (according to the data of its supporters) on the order of $1 to $2 TRILLION a year from 2030 to the end of the century, i.e., $70 to $140 TRILLION total for the period (not counting what it costs before then). But the effect would be a reduction in global average temperature in the year 2100 of at most 0.17C (0.306F)—an amount far too small to have any effect on any ecosystem or human wellbeing.

But that same amount of money, invested in economic development, would lift billions out of poverty. What we spend on fighting global warming we can’t spend on providing pure drinking water, sewage sanitation, nutrition supplements, infectious disease control, residential and commercial electrification, safe transportation, medical care, better housing, etc.

In short, the only way not to see a downside to fighting global warming is to be unacquainted with the vast, vast literature of the whole field of environmental economics as related to climate and energy policy. It’s nothing to be ashamed of—nobody can be expert in everything. But I hope these comments will give people who think the way “Bob” does some sense of how much less obvious and simple things are about this issue.

We don’t live in a risk-free world. There are costs and benefits to everything we do. (You risk a fatal fall when you get out of bed; but you risk suffocating by getting tangled in the sheets if you don’t. People do die of both causes every year in the United States.) One might, after studying all the arguments pro and con about climate change and climate and energy policy, reach a different conclusion from that of the Cornwall Alliance, summarized in our Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming and our Open Letter to Pope Francis on Climate Change, but that should be in full recognition that there are indeed downsides to every option.

Photo by Hermes Rivera on Unsplash.