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
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