“Statistical Murder”? By depriving communities of wealth, ill-conceived climate-change proposals will lead to worse health outcomes.

It’s often said that members of Generation Z are clueless, and the signs that these young people held at the November COP27 conference are evidence of that proposition. They fail to see the big picture. Let’s accept, for the moment, the premise of their advocacy: that human activities produce greenhouse gases (GHGs) such as carbon dioxide, which give rise to atmospheric warming, and thus to some degree of disruption and damage. Even so, as these health-care professionals should know, any cure should not be worse than the disease—but that’s precisely what we see in many proposed remedies for climate change.

Climate activists are clamoring for expensive interventions, including massive transformations of energy production, modes of transportation, building design, and even diminished population growth. They also want huge amounts of monetary compensation paid to poor countries to offset climate change-related environmental and economic damage. The most popular interventions include monumental expenditures on subsidies for wind turbines, solar panels, and electric vehicles. But will these measures produce the desired results? And isn’t it possible that depriving taxpayers of the vast resources required to fund climate measures would itself produce negative effects? The En-ROADS climate model, created by and maintained by Climate Interactive and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management, provides answers. En-ROADS is a highly complex, interactive model with a simple interface that allows users to explore and understand the effects of various interventions that influence climate, including the use of coal, nuclear, wind, and solar power, increasing the numbers of electric vehicles (EVs), the planting of trees, and so on.

En-ROADS examines the effects on temperature rise of global implementation of these various parameters out to the year 2100. It predicts that, if nothing is done by then, the planet’s temperature will rise by about 3.6 degrees Celsius. Maximal global use of wind turbines, solar panels, and other renewables would reduce that rise by only 0.2 degrees Celsius by the year 2100. Maximal incentives for a transition to electric vehicles globally would yield a similar reduction. For shorter periods, such as 30 years from now, those reductions, taken together, would amount to less than 0.05 degrees Celsius—in other words, negligible. Is this worth a price tag of more than $1,000 for every man, woman, and child in the United States?

Why does the model show temperatures rising even if we produce less carbon dioxide? Because carbon dioxide is like a blanket that keeps the warmth of the earth from escaping to space. Since existing carbon dioxide does not break down quickly, the warming will continue as long as more carbon dioxide is being produced.

An important aspect of these predictions is that they are predicated on the entire world following the West’s lead and implementing similar policies—a highly unlikely scenario. The “big five” emitters of CO2 are China, the U.S., India, the European Union, and Russia. China’s CO2 output has been rising rapidly and is now more than twice as large as that of the U.S. This is not going to change any time soon.