The High Cost of Green

Across the world, public finances are stretched dangerously thin. Per-person growth continues dropping while costs are climbing for pensions, education, health care and defense.

These urgent priorities could easily require an additional 3%-6% of GDP. Yet green campaigners are loudly calling for governments to spend up to 25% of our GDP, choking growth in the name of climate change.

Recent weather disasters — flooding across Asia and hurricanes hitting the US and Caribbean — have only increased the volume from commentators and politicians who tell us: “This is what climate change looks like.” 

The destruction, they say, provides added reason to double down on the Paris Agreement, the climate pact adopted in December 2015. Those who don’t think this way are haters and wreckers, no different from Donald Trump, who cancelled US involvement in the treaty.

Once a year or so, journalists from major news outlets travel to the Marshall Islands, a remote chain of volcanic islands and coral atolls in the Pacific Ocean, to report in panicked tones that the island nation is vanishing because of climate change. Their dispatches are often filled with raw emotion and suggest that residents are fleeing atolls swiftly sinking into the sea.