Economy
Climate researchers show we’re actually “safer than ever from climate” catastrophes
The climate safety denial movement
I and others have documented that we’re safer than ever from climate. Catastrophists can’t refute us, so they’re now saying that disaster deaths don’t matter!
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For decades climate catastrophists have portrayed climate disasters as getting deadlier and deadlier.
Now that I and others have documented that we’re safer than ever from climate, catastrophists are saying that disaster deaths don’t matter!
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- Reuters says “Drop in climate-related disaster deaths not evidence against climate emergency.”
But a drop in deaths from something—here, a 98% drop—is obvious evidence against it being an emergency.
Would Reuters say: “98% drop in flu deaths not evidence against flu emergency”?¹
- Why is Reuters, along with The New York Times, PolitiFact, and USA Today, claiming that a 98% drop in climate disaster deaths doesn’t contradict their climate emergency narrative? Because it obviously does, and they can only save their narrative by intimidating us into denying the obvious.²
- The central narrative of climate catastrophists is that fossil fuels and their CO2 emissions are killing more and more people via climate disasters.
This narrative has always had a fatal weakness: it totally contradicts the data, which show plummeting climate disaster deaths.³
- Why are climate disaster deaths plummeting as fossil fuel use and CO2 emissions rise?
Because the enormous ability uniquely cost-effective and scalable fossil fuel energy gives us to master climate danger far outweighs any new climate challenges from CO2 emissions.
- An example of fossil-fueled climate mastery overwhelming CO2 impacts is drought.
Any contribution of rising CO2 to drought has been overwhelmed by fossil-fueled irrigation and crop transport, which have helped reduce drought deaths by over 100 times over 100 years as CO2 levels have risen.⁴
- Over the last decade, I and a number of others, including Bjorn Lomborg and Michael Shellenberger, have challenged catastrophism by pointing to declining climate disaster deaths.
Catastrophists couldn’t refute our argument. So instead they pretended it didn’t exist.
Until last year.⁵
- In 2023, climate catastrophists finally felt compelled to address the fact that climate disaster deaths have plummeted (driven by fossil-fueled climate mastery).
Because of honesty? No—because Presidential candidates started bringing it up and persuading people with it.
- Here is Vivek Ramaswamy during his Presidential campaign referring to a 98% decline in climate disaster deaths—and, crucially, giving fossil fuel energy credit.
- Here is Ron DeSantis during his Presidential campaign referring to a 98% decline in climate disaster deaths—and, crucially, giving fossil fuel energy credit.
- The 98% decline in climate disaster deaths, driven by fossil fuels, is a blockbuster fact: it shows that we are experiencing not fossil-fueled climate emergency but fossil-fueled climate safety.
But instead of being happy, catastrophists engage in climate safety denial.
- Here are 3 recent instances of climate safety denial—from Reuters, PolitiFact, and USA Today. All have long portrayed climate deaths as a fast-increasing problem. But now they claim deaths don’t matter.
https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/drop-climate-related- disaster-deaths-not-evidence- against-climate-emergency- 2023-09-19/ - Climate safety denial utilizes 5 main myths to evade the decline in disaster deaths:
1. Fossil fuels don’t deserve credit
2. Weather forecasting deserves the credit
3. 100 years is a misleading period
4. Damages are drastically increasing
5. There’s a major increase in reported disasters - Myth 1: Fossil fuels don’t deserve much credit for plummeting climate disaster deaths; it’s “resilience.”
Truth: Uniquely cost-effective and scalable fossil fuel energy makes us resilient through plentiful infrastructure-building, heating and cooling, irrigation, transportation, etc.⁶
- Myth 2: Storm warning systems deserve the credit for plummeting climate disaster deaths.
Truth: Drought, not storm, deaths are the leading source of reduced climate deaths. And fossil fuels power storm warning and evacuation systems (and more resilient infrastructure).⁷
- Myth 3: 100 years is a misleading period to measure plummeting climate disaster deaths.
Truth: 100 years is a standard, very meaningful period to look at. While we have data going back an additional two decades, those tend to underreport due to less global communication.⁸
- Contrary to the claim that starting analysis of climate disaster deaths in the 1920s overestimates the decline, it actually likely underestimates the decline due to insufficient past reporting; data before WWII extremely likely underreport deaths compared to data after 2000.
- Myth 4: There is an alarming increase in reported disasters, revealing an underlying climate emergency.
Truth: The increase in reported disasters over time is due overwhelmingly to increased global communication. Changes in fundamentals, such as storms, are extremely modest.⁹
- The claim that more reported disasters show an increasingly dangerous climate is absurd in light of the fact that underlying data show massive increases in reporting before significant human climate impacts and the reporting trend also massively goes up for non-climate causes!
- Other biases might inflate the number of reported disasters. E.g., governments of poor countries have an incentive to declare more disasters with increasing international relief.¹⁰
- Using obviously problematic disaster frequency reporting instead of direct climatological evidence to try and show increasing climate danger is a revealing choice by catastrophists. They are making it because the climate change we’ve experienced has been very modest—and masterable.
Do Not Declare a “Climate Emergency”
·AUGUST 17, 2023Read full story - An example of unalarming climate fundamentals: neither the frequency nor the energy in global hurricanes has changed significantly relative to the noisy average. There is also little evidence for more landfalling hurricanes.¹¹
- The catastrophist attempt to undermine the 98% decrease in disaster deaths by pointing to the increased reporting of disasters is actually self-defeating.
If disaster deaths are plummeting despite incomplete past reporting, that means they’ve declined by even more than 98%.
- Myth 5: Climate damages are drastically increasing, revealing an underlying climate emergency.
Truth: Even though there are many incentives for climate damages to go up—preferences for riskier areas, government bailouts—GDP-adjusted damages are flat.¹²
- We often hear that “billion-dollar disasters” have increased significantly. But this is a bogus metric. Of course, as GDP grows we’ll have more billion-dollar disasters because there is more wealth for disasters to strike. But when we adjust for GDP there’s no increase in damage.¹³
- A Reuters “fact check” alarmingly claims a 151% growth in disaster damages from a period starting in 1978 to a period ending in 2017.
But they evade that the global economy grew by over 200% during that period!
(And they evade that disaster and damage reporting increased.)¹⁴
- The stupidest climate safety denial myth (used by The New York Times): 2 million people died from extreme weather in the last 50 years; that’s obviously an emergency.
Truth: 2 million in 50 years is a rate of 40,000 per year—far, far less than 100 years ago, thus confirming today’s climate safety.¹⁵
- The last-gasp climate safety denial myth: Okay, we’re safer than ever from climate disasters, and it is driven by cheap energy from fossil fuels, but we can easily replace fossil fuels with solar and wind.
Truth: For the foreseeable future there is no cheap global energy without fossil fuels.
The ultimate debunking of “solar and wind are cheaper than fossil fuels.”
·JULY 19, 2023Read full story - Observe that all these seemingly scientific outlets, such as The New York Times, Reuters, and PolitiFact are totally unable to refute the death-blow to their “climate emergency” narrative that is the drastic decline in climate disaster deaths.
Science requires that they admit defeat.
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UC San Diego – The Keeling Curve
For every million people on earth, annual deaths from climate-related causes (extreme temperature, drought, flood, storms, wildfires) declined 98%–from an average of 247 per year during the 1920s to 2.5 per year during the 2010s.
Data on disaster deaths come from EM-DAT, CRED / UCLouvain, Brussels, Belgium – www.emdat.be (D. Guha-Sapir).
Population estimates for the 1920s from the Maddison Database 2010, the Groningen Growth and Development Centre, Faculty of Economics and Business at University of Groningen. For years not shown, population is assumed to have grown at a steady rate.
Population estimates for the 2010s come from World Bank Data
From the Fraser Institute
By Jason Clemens and Jake Fuss
There are ostensibly two approaches to economic growth from a government policy perspective. The first is to create the best environment possible for entrepreneurs, business owners and investors by ensuring effective government that only does what’s needed, maintains competitive taxes and reasonable regulations. It doesn’t try to pick winners and losers but rather introduces policies to create a positive environment for all businesses to succeed.
The alternative is for the government to take an active role in picking winners and losers through taxes, spending and regulations. The idea here is that a government can promote certain companies and industries (as part of a larger “industrial policy”) better than allowing the market—that is, individual entrepreneurs, businesses and investors—to make those decisions.
It’s never purely one or the other but governments tend to generally favour one approach. The Trudeau era represented a marked break from the consensus that existed for more than two decades prior. Trudeau’s Ottawa introduced a series of tax measures, spending initiatives and regulations to actively constrain the traditional energy sector while promoting what the government termed the “green” economy.
The scope and cost of the policies introduced to actively pick winners and losers is hard to imagine given its breadth. Direct spending on the “green” economy by the federal government increased from $600 million the year before Trudeau took office (2014/15) to $23.0 billion last year (2024/25).
Ottawa introduced regulations to make it harder to build traditional energy projects (Bill C-69), banned tankers carrying Canadian oil from the northwest coast of British Columbia (Bill C-48), proposed an emissions cap on the oil and gas sector, cancelled pipeline developments, mandated almost all new vehicles sold in Canada to be zero-emission by 2035, imposed new homebuilding regulations for energy efficiency, changed fuel standards, and the list goes on and on.
Despite the mountain of federal spending and regulations, which were augmented by additional spending and regulations by various provincial governments, the Canadian economy has not been transformed over the last decade, but we have suffered marked economic costs.
Consider the share of the total economy in 2014 linked with the “green” sector, a term used by Statistics Canada in its measurement of economic output, was 3.1 per cent. In 2023, the green economy represented 3.6 per cent of the Canadian economy, not even a full one-percentage point increase despite the spending and regulating.
And Ottawa’s initiatives did not deliver the green jobs promised. From 2014 to 2023, only 68,000 jobs were created in the entire green sector, and the sector now represents less than 2 per cent of total employment.
Canada’s economic performance cratered in line with this new approach to economic growth. Simply put, rather than delivering the promised prosperity, it delivered economic stagnation. Consider that Canadian living standards, as measured by per-person GDP, were lower as of the second quarter of 2025 compared to six years ago. In other words, we’re poorer today than we were six years ago. In contrast, U.S. per-person GDP grew by 11.0 per cent during the same period.
Median wages (midpoint where half of individuals earn more, and half earn less) in every Canadian province are now lower than comparable median wages in every U.S. state. Read that again—our richest provinces now have lower median wages than the poorest U.S. states.
A significant part of the explanation for Canada’s poor performance is the collapse of private business investment. Simply put, businesses didn’t invest much in Canada, particularly when compared to the United States, and this was all pre-Trump tariffs. Canada’s fundamentals and the general business environment were simply not conducive to private-sector investment.
These results stand in stark contrast to the prosperity enjoyed by Canadians during the Chrétien to Harper years when the focus wasn’t on Ottawa picking winners and losers but rather trying to establish the most competitive environment possible to attract and retain entrepreneurs, businesses, investors and high-skilled professionals. The policies that dominated this period are the antithesis of those in place now: balanced budgets, smaller but more effective government spending, lower and competitive taxes, and smart regulations.
As the Carney government prepares to present its first budget to the Canadian people, many questions remain about whether there will be a genuine break from the policies of the Trudeau government or whether it will simply be the same old same old but dressed up in new language and fancy terms. History clearly tells us that when governments try to pick winners and losers, the strategy doesn’t lead to prosperity but rather stagnation. Let’s all hope our new prime minister knows his history and has learned its lessons.
Jason Clemens
Executive Vice President, Fraser Institute
Jake Fuss
Director, Fiscal Studies, Fraser Institute
Governor Tiff Macklem concedes the downturn runs deeper than a business cycle, citing trade wars, weak investment, and fading population growth as permanent drags on Canada’s economy.
In an extraordinary press conference on October 29th, 2025, Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem stood before reporters in Ottawa and calmly described what most Canadians have already been feeling for months: the economy is unraveling. But don’t expect him to say it in plain language. The central bank’s message was buried beneath bureaucratic doublespeak, carefully manicured forecasts, and bilingual spin. Strip that all away, and here’s what’s really going on: the Canadian economy has been gutted by a combination of political mismanagement, trade dependence, and a collapsing growth model based on mass immigration. The central bank knows it. The data proves it. And yet no one dares to say the quiet part out loud.
Start with the headline: the Bank of Canada cut interest rates by 25 basis points, bringing the policy rate down to 2.25%, its second consecutive cut and part of a 100 basis point easing campaign this year. That alone should tell you something is wrong. You don’t slash rates in a healthy economy. You do it when there’s pain. And there is. Canada’s GDP contracted by 1.6% in the second quarter of 2025. Exports are collapsing, investment is weak, and the unemployment rate is stuck at 7.1%, the highest non-pandemic level since 2016.
Macklem admitted it: “This is more than a cyclical downturn. It’s a structural adjustment. The U.S. trade conflict has diminished Canada’s economic prospects. The structural damage caused by tariffs is reducing the productive capacity of the economy.” That’s not just spin—that’s an admission of failure. A major trading nation like Canada has built its economic engine around exports, and now, thanks to years of reckless dependence on U.S. markets and zero effort to diversify, it’s all coming apart.
And don’t miss the implications of that phrase “structural adjustment.” It means the damage is permanent. Not temporary. Not fixable with a couple of rate cuts. Permanent. In fact, the Bank’s own Monetary Policy Report says that by the end of 2026, GDP will be 1.5% lower than it was forecast back in January. Half of that hit comes from a loss in potential output. The other half is just plain weak demand. And the reason that demand is weak? Because the federal government is finally dialing back the immigration faucet it’s been using for years to artificially inflate GDP growth.
The Bank doesn’t call it “propping up” GDP. But the facts are unavoidable. In its MPR, the Bank explicitly ties the coming consumption slowdown to a sharp drop in population growth: “Population growth is a key factor behind this expected slowdown, driven by government policies designed to reduce the inflow of newcomers. Population growth is assumed to slow to average 0.5% over 2026 and 2027.” That’s down from 3.3% just a year ago. So what was driving GDP all this time? People. Not productivity. Not innovation. Not exports. People.
And now that the government has finally acknowledged the political backlash of dumping half a million new residents a year into an overstretched housing market, the so-called “growth” is vanishing. It wasn’t real. It was demographic window dressing. Macklem admitted as much during the press conference when he said: “If you’ve got fewer new consumers in the economy, you’re going to get less consumption growth.” That’s about as close as a central banker gets to saying: we were faking it.
And yet despite all of this, the Bank still clings to its bureaucratic playbook. When asked whether Canada is heading into a recession, Macklem hedged: “Our outlook has growth resuming… but we expect that growth to be very modest… We could get two negative quarters. That’s not our forecast, but we can’t rule it out.” Translation: It’s already here, but we’re not going to admit it until StatsCan confirms it six months late.
Worse still, when reporters pressed him on what could lift the economy out of the ditch, he passed the buck. “Monetary policy can’t undo the damage caused by tariffs. It can’t target the hard-hit sectors. It can’t find new markets for companies. It can’t reconfigure supply chains.” So what can it do? “Mitigate spillovers,” Macklem says. That’s central banker code for “stand back and pray.”
So where’s the recovery supposed to come from? The Bank pins its hopes on a moderate rebound in exports, a bit of resilience in household consumption, and “ongoing government spending.” There it is. More public sector lifelines. More debt. More Ottawa Band-Aids.
And looming behind all of this is the elephant in the room: U.S. trade policy. The Bank explicitly warns that the situation could worsen depending on the outcome of next year’s U.S. election. The MPR highlights that tariffs are already cutting into Canadian income, raising business costs, and eliminating entire trade-dependent sectors. Governor Macklem put it plainly: “Unless something else changes, our incomes will be lower than they otherwise would have been.”
Canadians should be furious. For years, we were told everything was fine. That our economy was “resilient.” That inflation was “transitory.” That population growth would solve all our problems. Now we’re being told the economy is structurally impaired, trade-dependent to a fault, and stuck with weak per-capita growth, high unemployment, and sticky core inflation between 2.5–3%. And the people responsible for this mess? They’ve either resigned (Trudeau), failed upward (Carney), or still refuse to admit they spent a decade selling us a fantasy.
This isn’t just bad economics. It’s political malpractice.
Canada isn’t failing because of interest rates or some mysterious global volatility. It’s failing because of deliberate choices—trade dependence, mass immigration without infrastructure, and a refusal to confront reality. The central bank sees the iceberg. They’re easing the throttle. But the ship has already taken on water. And no one at the helm seems willing to turn the wheel.
So here’s the truth: The Bank of Canada just rang the alarm bell. Quietly. Cautiously. But clearly. The illusion is over. The fake growth era is ending. And the reckoning has begun.
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