Ein grünes BIP schadet dem Fortschritt

2013-03-14 "Propping the price of carbon permits is wrong," said Bjorn Lomborg, director of Copenhagen Consensus Center, a think tank, and an adjunct professor at Copenhagen Business School. He said higher carbon prices would damage the EU economy and would not help to achieve any significant climate goals. 

Across the world, politicians are going out of their way to promise fantastically expensive climate policies. President Biden has promised to spend $500 billion each year on climate — about 13 percent of the entire federal revenue. The European Union will spend 25 percent of its budget on climate.

Most rich countries now promise to go carbon-neutral by mid-century. Shockingly, only one country has made a serious, independent estimate of the cost: New Zealand found it would optimistically cost 16 percent of its GDP by then, equivalent to the entire current New Zealand budget.

WE are often told that tackling global warming should be the defining task of our age — that we must cut emissions immediately and drastically. But people are not buying the idea that, unless we act, the planet is doomed. Several recent polls have revealed Americans’ growing skepticism. Solving global warming has become their lowest policy priority, according to a new Pew survey. (...)