A critique of the apocalyptic climate narrative

According to the Apocalyptic climate narrative, humanity faces an existential threat from global warming that can be averted only by aggressive suppression of fossil-fuel use. The narrative has been promoted by environmental activists, prominent politicians, and the United Nations for more than three decades and has been accepted as gospel truth by many citizens of the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and other wealthy countries.

Alarming narratives that have an aura of plausibility can be highly effective tools for shaping public opinion and public policies. When such narratives are false or seriously misleading, they can do significant damage because of unintended consequences of their policy prescriptions. For example, an alarming narrative—rooted in a false, but plausible-sounding, analogy between the risks of nuclear power plants and nuclear bombs—helped turn public opinion against nuclear power and thereby induced much greater use of coal over the last 50 or so years.1 The substitution of coal for nuclear power shortened millions of lives (due to greater air pollution) and led to higher CO₂ emissions than would have otherwise occurred.

These unintended consequences of the anti-nuclear-power narrative should make us think carefully before the United States goes too far down the energy path prescribed by the Apocalyptic climate narrative.

This paper details the flaws in the Apocalyptic climate narrative, including why the threat from human-caused climate change is not dire and why urgent suppression of fossil-fuel use would be unwise. We argue that sensible public policies would focus instead on developing a diversified portfolio of energy sources to support greater resilience and flexibility to respond to whatever weather and climate extremes might occur. We identify nine principles for sensible US public policies toward energy and discuss implications of the flaws in the narrative for investors and their agents.

Hypothesized damaging consequences of global warming include: (i) loss of life from greater intensity and frequency of heat waves, hurricanes, floods, droughts, and wildfires, and (ii) economic losses from such extreme-weather events and from sea-level rise due to melting polar ice caps. Assessments of the impact from human-caused warming are complicated by the difficulty of determining the extent to which observed temperature increases are caused by natural climate variability—a difficulty that adds to the uncertainty in estimates of how much human-caused warming to expect over the 21st century.

The Apocalyptic climate narrative incorrectly portrays CO₂ emissions as inherently and unequivocally dangerous and an economic “bad,” that is, a purely negative externality. This portrayal ignores the fact that CO₂ yields direct benefits (e.g., it is plant food) and the inarguable technological reality that fossil fuels are currently irreplaceable inputs for producing food (via ammonia-based fertilizer), steel, cement, and plastics,12 which are central features of modern life.

The last 150 years have seen an enormous increase in human welfare that occurred to a large degree because of the use of fossil fuels for electricity, transportation, agriculture, and the material inputs for manufacturing and infrastructure construction. Fossil fuels have enabled huge advances in medicine, food production, communications, computing, ground and air travel, and much more. They have enabled billions of people to have lives of much higher quality, longer length, and generally greater material abundance than our ancestors—most of whom lived on the Malthusian margin of survival.

The 2015 Paris climate agreement set a goal of “net-zero” global emissions (a balance between greenhouse-gas emissions and offsetting emission removals) by 2050, which as a practical matter targets a drastic reduction in fossil-fuel use over the next 25 years. By 2024, 107 countries had adopted net-zero pledges. The United States entered the agreement under President Obama, exited under President Trump, re-entered under President Biden, and is in the process of exiting again under President Trump's second administration.

Although fossil fuels have played a critical role in generating enormous gains for humanity, there are good reasons for seeking ways to reduce our reliance on them, including geopolitical concerns, environmental degradation, and increasing costs of extraction.

What then makes sense for public policies to foster development of more abundant, secure, inexpensive, and clean energy? The foundation of any reasonable approach should be: First, do no harm. That means abandoning the Apocalyptic climate narrative's prescription of aggressively suppressing fossil-fuel use to attain net-zero CO₂ emissions in the near-term.

We should build on that foundation by (i) recognizing that human flourishing requires abundant and ever-increasing energy, (ii) pursuing research into a broad range of alternatives to fossil fuels as energy sources and as material inputs to production (e.g., as with fertilizer and plastics), (iii) approaching the next 25 years (and perhaps longer) as a learning period grounded in intelligent trial and error, and (iv) evaluating all technologies holistically for abundance, reliability, costs calculated on an “all-in” lifecycle basis, sensible land and resource use, air-quality impact, and environmental impact generally.

The Apocalyptic climate narrative is a seriously flawed guide for public policy because it (1) radically overstates the risks to humanity of continued global warming, which are manageable, not existential and (2) prescribes large-scale near-term suppression of fossil-fuel use, while failing to recognize the huge costs that such suppression would inflict on humans because fossil fuels are currently irreplaceable inputs for producing food (via ammonia-based fertilizer), steel, cement, and plastics.

The answers to four key questions provide a compact foundation for a far more sensible template for public policies toward global warming and the use of fossil fuels.

What would happen if the US enforced a net-zero emissions policy? In 2100, according to climate-model projections. Earth's average temperature would be lower (than it otherwise would be) by less than 0.2°C, which would be undetectable statistically given normal temperature variation. US consumption and production of goods created with steel, cement, and plastics, and of food grown with ammonia-based fertilizer would immediately plummet because of the essential role fossil fuels play in their creation. A sharp decline in the quality of life would surely ensue.

Is it worth it? Is an undetectable reduction in the warming trend worth a huge sacrifice in the quality of life caused by an urgent move to net-zero? According to the Apocalyptic climate narrative, the answer is yes because humanity (ostensibly) faces an existential threat from global warming. However, there is no credible evidence of an existential threat from global warming. Nor, indeed, is there evidence of warming-related costs that cannot be addressed by humanity's resilience and ability to adapt to extreme climates.

Is an aggressive move to net-zero emissions politically feasible? Public policies that enforce an urgent move to net-zero would be especially hard to sell to the US electorate once voters see the costs they would bear. The resistance would almost surely grow stronger as more voters come to realize that, regardless of their personal quality-of-life sacrifices, global warming is predicted to continue because China, India, Russia, Iran, and many other countries have strong incentives to continue to use fossil fuels.

What then should the US do about global warming? We should encourage investment in efforts to find and improve alternatives to fossil fuels and in adaptation to a changing climate. We should not suppress fossil-fuel use because that would impose serious costs while generating no detectable benefits. Such suppression would put the net-zero cart before the horse, which is finding viable alternatives to fossil fuels in the myriad ways they enable humans to live far longer and much higher quality lives than our ancestors did even as recently as 100 years ago.