End fossil fuel use now – and billions of people will die

Activists this week gather outside the Supreme Court in London over the full climate impact of burning oil from new wells. Picture: Carl Court/Getty Images

We endlessly hear the flawed assertion that because climate change is real, we should “follow the science” and end fossil fuel use.

We hear this claim from politicians who favour swift carbon cuts and from natural scientists, as when the editor-in-chief of Nature insists “The science is clear – fossil fuels must go.” The assertion is convenient for politicians because it allows them to avoid responsibility for the many costs and downsides of climate policy, painting these as inevitable results of following the scientific evidence. But it is false because it confounds climate science with climate policy.

Careful climate science clearly is needed to shape thoughtful climate policy because it tells us what the physical impact will be of emitting more or less carbon dioxide. But climate policy – like any policy – should be the democratic outcome of a deliberation of the benefits of cutting emissions versus the costs. Climate science tells us about some of these benefits but tells us nothing of the costs, which instead come from the much less hyped field of climate economics.

The story told by activist politicians and climate campaigners suggests there are nothing but benefits to ending fossil fuels, versus a hellscape if nothing is done.

But the reality is the world has improved across the past centuries, largely because of the increase in available energy that has come mostly from fossil fuels. Life spans have more than doubled, hunger has declined dramatically and incomes have increased tenfold.

Politicians and climate campaigners suggest that there are nothing but benefits to ending fossil fuels, versus a hellscape if nothing is done. Picture: Jung Yeon-je, AFP.

While the impact of climate change is likely negative, it is typically exaggerated. We constantly hear about extreme weather such as droughts, storms, floods and fires, although even the UN Climate Panel finds that evidence of them worsening cannot yet be documented for most of these. But, more important, a richer world is much more resilient and hence much less affected by extreme weather.

The data shows climate-related deaths from droughts, storms, floods and fires have declined by more than 97 per cent from nearly 500,000 annually a century ago to less than 15,000 in the 2020s.

At the same time, the costs of climate campaigners’ calls to “just stop” oil, gas and coal are downplayed. The world gets almost four-fifths of its energy from fossil fuels. If we quickly ended our use of fossil fuels, billions would die.

Four billion people – half the world’s population – depend on food grown with synthetic fertiliser produced almost entirely by natural gas. If we ended fossil fuels quickly, we would have no way to feed four billion people. Add the billions of people dependent on fossil fuel heating in the winter, along with the dependence on fossil fuels for steel, cement, plastics and transport, and it is little wonder that one recent estimate by former Bank of England economist Neil Record, writing in British newspaper The Telegraph, shows abruptly ending fossil fuels would lead to six billion people dying in less than a year.

These vast downsides are not considered within climate science, which understandably focuses on carbon emissions and climate models. Clearly, though, they should be an integral part of the debate about climate policy.

We would laugh if politicians said we should “follow the science” and stop traffic deaths by reducing speeds to 5km/h.

Most politicians suggest a slightly less rushed end to fossil fuels by 2050. This slower pace would avoid billions of people dying outright but the downsides are still immense. The latest peer-reviewed climate-economic research shows efficiently reaching net-zero emissions by 2050 will cost a staggering $US27 trillion ($40.5 trillion) a year on average across the century – one-quarter of the world’s current GDP. The same research shows the benefits will be just a small fraction of that cost. The policy is prohibitively expensive for little benefit.

A good analogy is to consider the more than one million global traffic deaths annually. Traffic, like climate change, is a man-made problem. Like climate change, it is something we could solve. If scientists were to look only at how to avoid the million traffic deaths, one solution would be to reduce speed limits everywhere to about 5km/h. If heavily enforced, this would eliminate traffic deaths almost entirely. Of course, it also almost entirely would eliminate our economies and productive lives.

We would laugh if politicians said we should “follow the science” and stop traffic deaths by reducing speeds to 5km/h. We would laugh because they’re intentionally conflating science with policy.

As we do with traffic, in the climate debate we should take a sensible approach. This means focusing on short-term adaptation to build resilience and long-term investment in research and development for green energy. Innovation must drive the price of reliable green energy down below fossil fuels, eventually making sure everyone can switch to low-carbon alternatives.

When politicians tell us they are “following the science”, they use the claim to shut down open discussion of the enormous costs of their policies. “The science” informs us about the problem but is not the arbiter of solutions. Democracies are.

Sudden dramatic cuts in fossil fuel consumption will have huge downsides that their backers would rather ignore. Climate change is a problem, but a civilisation-endangering cure can be far worse than the illness.

Bjorn Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus, visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and author of False Alarm and Best Things First.