From the Fraser Institute

By Bjørn Lomborg

At a time when public finances are strained, and Canada and the world are facing many problems and threats, we need to consider policy choices carefully. On climate, we should spend smartly to solve it effectively, making sure there is enough money left over for all the other challenges.

A sensible response to climate change starts with telling it as it is. We are bombarded with doom-mongering that is too often just plain wrong. Climate change is a problem but it’s not the end of the world.

Yet the overheated rhetoric has convinced governments to spend taxpayer funds heavily on subsidizing current, inefficient solutions. In 2024, the world spent a record-setting CAD$3 trillion on the green energy transition. Taxpayers are directly and indirectly subsidizing millions of wind turbines and solar panels that do little for climate change but line the coffers of green energy companies.

We need to do better and invest more in the only realistic solution to climate change: low-carbon energy research and development. Studies indicate that every dollar invested in green R&D can prevent $11 in long-term climate damages, making it the most effective long-term global climate policy.

Throughout history, humanity has tackled major challenges not by imposing restrictions but by innovating and developing transformative technologies. We didn’t address 1950s air pollution in Los Angeles by banning cars but by creating the catalytic converter. We didn’t combat hunger by urging people to eat less, but through the 1960s Green Revolution that innovated high-yielding varieties to grow much more food.

In 1980, after the oil price shocks, the rich world spent more than 8 cents of every $100 of GDP on green R&D to find energy alternatives. As fossil fuels became cheap again, investment dropped. When climate concern grew, we forgot innovation and instead the focus shifted to subsidizing existing, ineffective solar and wind.

In 2015, governments promised to double green R&D spending by 2020, but did no such thing. By 2023, the rich world still wasn’t back to spending even 4 cents out of every $100 of GDP.

Globally, the rich world spends just CAD$35 billion on green R&D — one-hundredth of overall “green” spending. We should increase this four-fold to about $140 billion a year. Canada’s share would be less than $5 billion a year, less than a tenth of its 2024 CAD$50 billion energy transition spending.

This would allow us to accelerate green innovation and bring forward the day green becomes cheaper than fossil fuels. Breakthroughs are needed in many areas. Take nuclear power. Right now, it is way too expensive, largely because extensive regulations force the production of every new power plant into what essentially becomes a unique, eye-wateringly expensive, extravagant artwork.

The next generation of nuclear power would work on small, modular reactors that get type approval in the production stage and then get produced by the thousand at low cost. The merits of this approach are obvious: we don’t have a bureaucracy that, at a huge cost, certifies every consumer’s cellphone when it is bought. We don’t see every airport making ridiculously burdensome requirements for every newly built airplane. Instead, they both get type-approved and then mass-produced.

We should support the innovation of so-called fourth-generation nuclear power, because if Canadian innovation can make nuclear energy cheaper than fossil fuels, everyone in the world will be able to make the switch—not just rich, well-meaning Canadians, but China, India, and countries across Africa.

Of course, we don’t know if fourth-generation nuclear will work out. That is the nature of innovation. But with smarter spending on R&D, we can afford to focus on many potential technologies. We should consider investing in innovation to grow hydrogen production along with water purification, next-generation battery technology, growing algae on the ocean surface producing CO₂-free oil (a proposal from the decoder of the human genome, Craig Venter), CO₂ extraction, fusion, second-generation biofuels, and thousands of other potential areas.

We must stop believing that spending ever-more money subsidizing still-inefficient technology is going to be a major part of the climate solution. Telling voters across the world for many decades to be poorer, colder, less comfortable, with less meat, fewer cars and no plane travel will never work, and will certainly not be copied by China, India and Africa. What will work is innovating a future where green is cheaper.

Innovation needs to be the cornerstone of our climate policy. Secondly, we need to invest in adaptation. Adaptive infrastructure like green areas and water features help cool cities during heatwaves. Farmers already adapt their practices to suit changing climates. As temperatures rise, farmers plant earlier, with better-adapted varieties or change what they grow, allowing the world to be ever-better fed.

Adaptation has often been overlooked in climate change policy, or derided as a distraction from reducing emissions. The truth is it’s a crucial part of avoiding large parts of the climate problem.

Along with innovation and adaptation, the third climate policy is to drive human development. Lifting communities out of poverty and making them flourish is not just good in and of itself — it is also a defense against rising temperatures. Eliminating poverty reduces vulnerability to climate events like heat waves or hurricanes. Prosperous societies afford more healthcare, social protection, and investment in climate adaptation. Wealthy countries spend more on environmental preservation, reducing deforestation, and promoting conservation efforts.

Focusing funds on these three policy areas will mean Canada can help spark the breakthroughs that are needed to lower energy costs while reducing emissions and making future generations around the world more resilient to climate and all the other big challenges. The path to solving climate change lies in innovation, adaptation, and building prosperous economies.

From the Fraser Institute

By Bjørn Lomborg

Whenever there’s a heatwave—whether at home or abroad—the media loves to splash it. Politicians and campaigners then jump in to warn that climate change is at fault, and urge us to cut carbon emissions. But they are only telling us one-tenth of the story and giving terrible advice.

Global warming indeed causes more heat waves, and these raise the risk that more people die because of heat. That much is true. But higher temperatures also cause a reduction in cold temperatures, reducing the risk that people die from the cold. Almost everywhere in the world—not just Canada—cold kills 5-15 times more people than heat.

Heat gets a lot of attention both because of its obvious link to climate change and because it is immediately visible—meaning it is photogenic for the media. Heat kills within a few days of temperatures getting too high, because it alters the fluid and electrolytic balance in weaker, often older people.

Cold, on the other hand, slowly kills over months. At low temperatures, the body constricts outer blood vessels to conserve heat, driving up blood pressure. High blood pressure is the world’s leading killer, causing 19 per cent of all deaths.

Depending on where we live, taking into account infrastructure like heating and cooling, along with vehicles and clothes to keep us comfortable, there is a temperature at which deaths will be at a minimum. If it gets warmer or colder, more people will die.

A recent Lancet study shows that if we count all the additional deaths from too-hot temperatures globally, heat kills nearly half a million people each year. But too-cold temperatures are more than nine-times deadlier, killing over 4.5 million people.

In Canada, unsurprisingly, cold is even deadlier, killing more than 12 times more than heat. Each year, about 1,400 Canadians die from heat, but more than 17,000 die because of the cold.

Every time there is a heatwave, climate activists will tell you that global warming is an existential problem and we need to switch to renewables. And yes, the terrible heat dome in BC in June 2021 tragically killed 450-600 people and was likely made worse by global warming. But in that same year, the cold in BC killed 2,500 people, yet these deaths made few headlines.

Moreover, the advice from climate activists—that we should hasten the switch away from fossil fuels—is deeply problematic. Switching to renewables drives up energy prices. How do people better survive heat? With air conditioning. Over the last century, despite the temperature increasing, the US saw a remarkable drop in heat deaths because of more air conditioning. Making electricity for air conditioning more expensive means especially poorer people cannot afford to stay cool, and more people die.

Likewise, access to more heating has made our homes less deadly in winter, driving down cold mortality over the 20th century. One study shows that cheap gas heating in the late 2000s saved 12,500 Americans from dying of cold each year. Making heating more expensive will consign at least 12,500 people to die each year because they can no longer afford to keep warm.

One thing climate campaigners never admit is that current temperature rises actually make fewer people die overall from heat and cold. While rising temperatures drive more heat deaths, they also reduce the number of cold deaths — and because cold deaths are much more prevalent, this reduces total deaths significantly.

The only global estimate shows that in the last two decades, rising temperatures have increased heat deaths by 0.21 percentage points but reduced cold deaths by 0.51 percentage points. Rising temperatures have reduced net global death by 0.3 per cent, meaning some 166,000 deaths have been avoided. The researchers haven’t done the numbers for Canada alone, but combined with the US, increased temperatures have caused an extra 5,000 heat deaths annually, but reduced the number of cold deaths by 14,000.

If temperatures keep rising, cold deaths can only be reduced so much. Eventually, of course, total deaths will increase again. But a new near-global Nature study shows that, looking only at the impact of climate change, the number of total dead from heat and cold will stay lower than today almost up to a 3oC temperature increase, which is more than currently expected by the end of the century.

People claim that we will soon be in a world that is literally too hot and humid to live in, using something called the “wet bulb” temperature. But under realistic assumptions, the actual number of people who by century’s end will live in unlivable circumstances is still zero.

The incessant focus on tens or hundreds of people dying in for instance Indian heatwaves makes us forget that even in India, cold is a much bigger challenge. While heat kills 89,000 people each year, cold kills seven times more at 632,000 every year. Yet, you would never know with the current climate information we get.

Hearing only the alarmist side of heat and cold deaths not only scares people—especially younger generations—but points us toward ineffective policies that drive up energy costs and let more people die from lack of adequate protection against both heat and cold.

Bjørn Lomborg