TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
Quick shift to fossil fuel-free world, misguided dream
Listening to climate change activists, one gets the impression that we could transition to a fossil fuel-free world in the near future. Besides the virtual impossibility of quickly moving away from coal, oil and natural gas, the source of 85 percent of global primary energy, we need to ask, do we really want to do this? #opinion
Change Size
Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States - known as the Group of Seven (G7) - pledged in 2016 to phase out their support for fossil fuels by 2025. (Shutterstock/File)
L
istening to climate change activists, one gets the impression that we could transition to a fossil fuel-free world in the near future. Besides the virtual impossibility of quickly moving away from coal, oil and natural gas, the source of 85 percent of global primary energy, we need to ask, do we really want to do this?
That the average person finds it difficult to do a sensible cost-benefit analysis is not surprising. Practically all we hear about fossil fuels from mainstream media, government and special interest groups is their supposed cost, but not their very real and important benefits.
Leading the list of alleged problems is that carbon dioxide ( CO2 ) emissions from using these fuels will heat the atmosphere over the next century and create disastrous consequences. Most people recognize that the weather bureau cannot accurately predict our weather a week in advance. Yet, we are supposed to take seriously forecasts for the year 2100.
The reports of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change summarize thousands of studies from peer-reviewed scientific journals that demonstrate that emissions of CO2 from human activities are not known to cause dangerous climate change. Yet the public tend to base their opinions on the emotions generated by misleading stories about such things as dying polar bears, a species which has actually quintupled in population in the last half century.
Regardless, even experts find it challenging to conduct a proper a cost-benefit analysis on climate change and fossil fuels.
In 2011, writing for the Dublin, Ireland Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI Working Paper No. 392), M. Ceronsky and associates concluded that: “the complexity of climate science and economics makes conducting any of these cost-benefit analysis a difficult and perhaps even an impossible challenge.”
Martin Weitzman, professor of economics at Harvard University, went even further in a 2015 paper in Review of Environmental Economics and Policywhen he said: “the economics of climate change is a problem from hell […] trying to do a benefit-cost analysis of climate change policies bends and stretches the capability or our standard economist’s toolkit, up to and perhaps beyond the breaking point.”
