Despite what activists say, the planet is not on fire

Nearly half of young Canadians surveyed in a 2022 study said they believed humanity is doomed because of climate change, while more than three-quarters said they were frightened. No wonder. They have grown up bombarded both by footage of natural disasters, not just in Canada but around the world, and by activists’ claims that climate change is making the planet unliveable. But that’s just wrong.

The ubiquity of phone cameras and our ability to instantly communicate mean — the “CNN effect” — that the media can show more weather disasters now than ever before. But that doesn’t mean the disasters are deadlier or costlier.

As we saw in the first article in this series, deaths from climate-related disasters have dropped precipitously. On average in the 1870s five million people a year died from such disasters. A century ago, about half a million people a year did. In the past decade, however, the death toll worldwide was fewer than 10,000 people a year. As global population has more than quintupled, disaster deaths have declined 500-fold. And this dramatic decline is true for all major disaster categories, including floods, flash floods, cold waves and wind disasters, and for rich and poor countries alike. But you never hear about that during disaster reporting.

Floods are the most costly and frequent Canadian disasters. But the common claim that flood costs are rising dramatically ignores the obvious fact that when a flood plain has many more houses on it than decades ago and the houses are worth much more then the same flood will cause a lot more damage. We need to keep these changes in mind and measure costs in proportion to GDP. Even the UN says that’s how to measure whether cities and towns are safer.

Though peer-reviewed analysis for Canada is lacking there is plenty to draw on elsewhere. As so often, the U.S. has the most comprehensive data. It shows that while flood costs have increased in absolute terms, that’s only because more people and property are in harm’s way. In the country’s worst year for flooding, 1913, damage exceeded two per cent of GDP, though the yearly average in that era was 0.5 per cent. Today it’s less than 0.05 per cent of GDP — just a tenth what it was a century ago.

We know adaptation makes disasters much less threatening over time. Consider sea level rise, which threatens to flood coastal zones around the world. A much-cited study shows that at the turn of this century an average of 3.4 million people a year experienced coastal flooding, with $11 billion in annual damages. At the same time, around $13 billion or 0.05 per cent of global GDP was spent on coastal defences.

By the end of this century, more people will be in harm’s way, and climate change could raise sea levels by as much as a metre. If we don’t improve coastal defences, vast areas will be routinely inundated, flooding 187 million people and causing $55 trillion in annual damages, more than five per cent of global GDP in 2100. This finding does routinely make headlines.

But it ignores adaptation, which research shows will cost much less. On average, countries will avoid flood damage by spending just 0.005 per cent of GDP. Even with higher sea levels, far fewer people will be flooded — by 2100 just 15,000 people a year. Even the combined cost of adaptation and damage will be just 0.008 per cent of GDP.

Enormously ambitious emissions-reduction policies costing hundreds of trillions of dollars could cut the number of people flooded at century’s end from that 15,000 number down to about 10,000 per year. But notice the difference: Adaptation reduces the number currently being flooded by almost 3.4 million and avoids another 184 million people being flooded annually by 2100. At best, climate policy can save just 0.005 million.

We often hear that the “world is on fire” because of climate change. New Liberal leader Mark Carney repeated that in his acceptance speech Sunday. And it’s true that in 2023 more of Canada’s surface area burned than in any year since 1970, with climate change probably partly to blame. Even so, two points need to be kept in mind.

First, most studies projecting an increase in wildfires ignore adaptation. In fact, humans don’t like fire and make great efforts to reduce it, which is why since 1900 humanity has seen less burned area, not more. The data from last century involve historical reconstruction but since 1997, NASA satellites have tracked all significant fires. The record shows a dramatic fall in global burned area. Last year it was the second lowest, and in 2022 the lowest ever. And studies find that with adaptation the area burned will keep falling, even without climate action.

Second, reducing emissions is a terribly inefficient way to help. Studies by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency show that even drastic cuts in emissions would reduce the burned area only slightly this century. Simpler, cheaper, faster policies like better forest management, prescribed fires and cleaning out undergrowth can help much more.

The flood of disaster porn is terrifying our kids and skewing our perception, and that can only lead to bad climate policy.

Bjørn Lomborg

Related Topics:#BjornLomborg #FraserInstitute #GlobalWarming climatechange PlanetNotOnFire

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Global Warming Policies Hurt the Poor

Published on April 15, 2025

Duane Rolheiser

From the Fraser Institute

By Bjørn Lomborg

Had prices been kept at the same level, an average family of four would be spending £1,882 on electricity. Instead, that family now pays £5,425 per year. The average UK person now consumes just over 10 kWh per day—a low point in consumption not seen since the 1960s.

We are often told by climate campaigners that climate change is especially pernicious because its effects over coming decades will disproportionately affect the poorest people in Canada and the world. Unfortunately, they miss that climate policies are directly hurting the poor right now.

More energy leads to better, healthier, longer lives. Less energy means fewer opportunities. Climate policies demand we pay more for less reliable energy. The impact is greater if you’re poorer: the wealthy might grumble about higher costs but can generally absorb them; the poor are forced to cut back.

For evidence, look to the United Kingdom which has led the world on stiff climate policies and net zero promises for some two decades, sustained by successive governments: its inflation-adjusted electricity price, weighted across households and industry, has tripled from 2003 to 2023, mostly because of climate policies. The total, annual UK electricity bill is now $CAD160 billion, which is $CAD105 billion more than if prices in real terms had stayed unchanged since 2003. This unnecessary increase is so costly that it is twice the entire cost that the UK spends on elementary education. Had prices been kept at the same level, an average family of four would be spending £1,882 on electricity. Instead, that family now pays £5,425 per year.

Over that time, the richest one per cent absorbed the costs and even managed to increase their consumption. But the poorest fifth of UK households saw their electricity consumption decline by a massive one-third.

The effects of climate policies mean the UK can afford less power. The average UK person now consumes just over 10 kWh per day—a low point in consumption not seen since the 1960s. While global individual electricity consumption is steadily increasing, the energy available to an average Brit is sharply decreasing.

Climate policies hurt the poor even in energy-abundant countries like Canada and the United States. Universally, poor people in well-off countries use much more of their limited budgets paying for electricity and heating. US low-income consumers spend three-times more on electricity as a percentage of their total spending than high-income consumers. It’s easy to understand why the elites have no problem supporting electricity or gas price hikes—they can easily afford them.

As mentioned in the article on cold and heat deaths, high energy prices literally kill people—and this is especially true for the poor. Cold homes are one of the leading causes of deaths in winter through strokes, heart attacks, and respiratory diseases. Researchers looked at the natural experiment that happened in the United States around 2010, when fracking delivered a dramatic reduction in costs of natural gas. The massive increase in availability of natural gas drove down the price of heating. The scientists concluded that every single winter, lower energy prices from fracking save about 12,500 Americans from dying. To put this another way, all else being equal, a reversal and hike in energy prices would kill an additional 12,500 people each year.

As bleak as things are for the poor in rich countries, virtue-signaling climate policy has even farther-reaching impacts on the developing world, where people desperately need more access to the cheap and plentiful energy that previously allowed rich nations to develop. In the poor half of the world, more than two billion people have to cook and keep warm with polluting fuels such as dung and wood. This means their indoor air is so polluted it is equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes a day—causing millions of deaths each year.

In Africa, electricity is so scarce that the total electricity available per person is much less than what a single refrigerator in the rich world uses. This hampers industrialization, growth, and opportunity. Case in point: The rich world on average has 650 tractors per 50km2, while the impoverished parts of Africa have just one.

But rich countries like Canada—through restrictions on bilateral aid and contributions to global bodies like the World Bank—refuse to fund anything remotely fossil fuel-related. More and more development and aid money is being diverted to climate change, away from the world’s more pressing challenges.

Canada still gets more than three-quarters of its energy (not just electricity) from fossil fuels. Yet, it blocks poor countries from achieving more energy access, with the naïve suggestion that the poor “skip” to intermittent solar and wind with an unreliability that the rich world does not accept to fulfil its own, much bigger needs.

A large 2021 survey of leaders in low- and middle-income countries shows education, employment, peace and health are at the top of their development priorities, with climate coming 12th out of 16 issues. But wealthy countries refuse to pay attention to what poor countries need, in the name of climate change.

The blinkered pursuit of climate goals blinds politicians in rich countries like Canada to the impacts on the poor, both here and across the world in developing nations. Climate policies that cause higher energy costs and push people toward unreliable energy sources disproportionately burden those least able to bear them.