DeDevelopment Neg cfjmp lab’s DeDev File Uniqueness

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Warming

2AC Growth Solves Warming

Growth solves warming – [research, the California effect, the EKC, and better tech]

Norberg, 03 – Fellow at Timbro and CATO [Johan Norberg, In Defense of Global Capitalism, pg 225-237]

All over the world, economic progress and growth are moving hand in hand with intensified environmental protection. Four researchers who studied these connections found “a very strong, positive association between our [environmental] indicators and the level of economic development.” A country that is very poor is too preoccupied with lifting itself out of poverty to bother about the environment at all. Countries usually begin protecting their natural resources when they can afford to do so. When they grow richer, they start to regulate effluent emissions, and when they have still more resources they also begin regulating air quality. 19 A number of factors cause environment protection to increase with wealth and development. Environmental quality is unlikely to be a top priority for people who barely know where their next meal is coming from. Abating misery and subduing the pangs of hunger takes precedence over conservation. When our standard of living rises we start attaching importance to the environment and obtaining resources to improve it. Such was the case earlier in western Europe, and so it is in the developing countries today. Progress of this kind, however, requires that people live in democracies where they are able and allowed to mobilize opinion; otherwise, their preferences will have no impact. Environmental destruction is worst in dictatorships. But it is the fact of prosperity no less than a sense of responsibility that makes environmental protection easier in a wealthy society. A wealthier country can afford to tackle environmental problems; it can develop environmentally friendly technologies—wastewater and exhaust emission control, for example—and begin to rectify past mistakes. Global environmental development resembles not so much a race for the bottom as a race to the top, what we might call a “California effect.” The state of California's Clean Air Acts, first introduced in the 1970s and tightened since, were stringent emissions regulations that made rigorous demands on car manufacturers. Many prophets of doom predicted that firms and factories would move to other states, and California would soon be obliged to repeal its regulations. But instead the opposite happened: other states gradually tightened up their environmental stipulations. Because car companies needed the wealthy California market, manufacturers all over the United States were forced to develop new techniques for reducing emissions. Having done so, they could more easily comply with the exacting requirements of other states, whereupon those states again ratcheted up their requirements. Anti-globalists usually claim that the profit motive and free trade together cause businesses to entrap politicians in a race for the bottom. The California effect implies the opposite: free trade enables politicians to pull profit-hungry corporations along with them in a race to the top. This phenomenon occurs because compliance with environmental rules accounts for a very small proportion of most companies' expenditures. What firms are primarily after is a good business environment—a liberal economy and a skilled workforce— not a bad natural environment. A review of research in this field shows that there are no clear indications of national environmental rules leading to a diminution of exports or to fewer companies locating in the countries that pass the rules. 20 This finding undermines both the arguments put forward by companies against environmental regulations and those advanced by environmentalists maintaining that globalization has to be restrained for environmental reasons. Incipient signs of the California effect's race to the top are present all over the world, because globalization has caused different countries to absorb new techniques more rapidly, and the new techniques are generally far gentler on the environment. Researchers have investigated steel manufacturing in 50 different countries and concluded that countries with more open economies took the lead in introducing cleaner technology. Production in those countries generated almost 20 percent less emissions than the same production in closed countries. This process is being driven by multinational corporations because they have a lot to gain from uniform production with uniform technology. Because they are restructured more rapidly, they have more modern machinery. And they prefer assimilating the latest, most environmentally friendly technology immediately to retrofitting it, at great expense, when environmental regulations are tightened up. Brazil, Mexico, and China—the three biggest recipients of foreign investment—have followed a very clear pattern: the more investments they get, the better control they gain over air pollution. The worst forms of air pollution have diminished in their cities during the period of globalization. When Western companies start up in developing countries, their production is considerably more environment-friendly than the native production, and they are more willing to comply with environmental legislation, not least because they have brand images and reputations to protect. Only 30 percent of Indonesian companies comply with the country's environmental regulations, whereas no fewer than 80 percent of the multinationals do so. One out of every 10 foreign companies maintained a standard clearly superior to that of the regulations. This development would go faster if economies were more open and, in particular, if the governments of the world were to phase out the incomprehensible tariffs on environmentally friendly technology. 21 Sometimes one hears it said that, for environmental reasons, the poor countries of the South must not be allowed to grow as affluent as our countries in the North. For example, in a compilation of essays on Environmentally Significant Consumption published by the National Academy of Sciences, we find anthropologist Richard Wilk fretting that: If everyone develops a desire for the Western high-consumption lifestyle, the relentless growth in consumption, energy use, waste, and emissions may be disastrous. 22 But studies show this to be colossal misapprehension. On the contrary, it is in the developing countries that we find the gravest, most harmful environmental problems. In our affluent part of the world, more and more people are mindful of environmental problems such as endangered green areas. Every day in the developing countries, more than 6,9000 people die from air pollution when using wood, dung, and agricultural waste in their homes as heating and cooking fuel. UNDP estimates that no fewer than 2.2 million people die every year from polluted indoor air. This result is already “disastrous” and far more destructive than atmospheric pollution and industrial emissions. Tying people down to that level of development means condemning millions to premature death every year. It is not true that pollution in the modern sense increases with growth. Instead, pollution follows an inverted U-curve. When growth in a very poor country gathers speed and the chimneys begin belching smoke, the environment suffers. But when prosperity has risen high enough, the environmental indicators show an improvement instead: emissions are reduced, and air and water show progressively lower concentrations of pollutants. The cities with the worst problems are not Stockholm, New York, and Zürich, but rather Beijing, Mexico City, and New Delhi. In addition to the factors already mentioned, this is also due to the economic structure changing from raw-material-intensive to knowledge-intensive production. In a modern economy, heavy, dirty industry is to a great extent superseded by service enterprises. Banks, consulting firms, and information technology corporations do not have the same environmental impact as old factories. According to one survey of available environmental data, the turning point generally comes before a country's per capita GDP has reached $8,000. At $10,000, the researchers found a positive connection between increased growth and better air and water quality. 23 That is roughly the level of prosperity of Argentina, South Korea, or Slovenia. In the United States, per capita GDP is about $36,300. Here as well, the environment has consistently improved since the 1970s, quite contrary to the picture one gets from the media. In the 1970s there was constant reference to smog in American cities, and rightly so: the air was judged to be unhealthy for 100–300 days a year. Today it is unhealthy for fewer than 10 days a year, with the exception of Los Angeles. There, the figure is roughly 80 days, but even that represents a 50 percent reduction in 10 years. 24 The same trend is noticeable in the rest of the affluent world—for example, in Tokyo, where, a few decades ago, doomsayers believed that oxygen masks would in the future have to be worn all around the city because of the bad air. Apart from its other positive effects on the developing countries, such as ameliorating hunger and sparing people the horror of watching their children die, prosperity beyond a certain critical point can improve the environment. What is more, this turning point is now occurring progressively earlier in the developing countries, because they can learn from more affluent countries' mistakes and use their superior technology. For example, air quality in the enormous cities of China, which are the most heavily polluted in the world, has steadied since the mid-1980s and in several cases has slowly improved. This improvement has coincided with uniquely rapid growth. Some years ago, the Danish statistician and Greenpeace member Bjørn Lomborg, with about 10 of his students, compiled statistics and facts about the world's environmental problems. To his astonishment, he found that what he himself had regarded as self-evident, the steady deterioration of the global environment, did not agree at all with official empirical data. He found instead that air pollution is diminishing, refuse problems are diminishing, resources are not running out, more people are eating their fill, and people are living longer. Lomborg gathered publicly available data from as many fields as he could find and published them in the book The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World. The picture that emerges there is an important corrective to the general prophesies of doom that can so easily be imbibed from newspaper headlines. Lomborg shows that air pollution and emissions have been declining in the developed world during recent decades. Heavy metal emissions have been heavily reduced; nitrogen oxides have diminished by almost 30 percent and sulfur emissions by about 80 percent. Pollution and emission problems are still growing in the poor developing countries, but at every level of growth annual particle density has diminished by 2 percent in only 14 years. In the developed world, phosphorus emissions into the seas have declined drastically, and E. coli bacteria concentrations in coastal waters have plummeted, enabling closed swimming areas to reopen. Lomborg shows that, instead of large-scale deforestation, the world's forest acreage increased from 40.24 million to 43.04 million square kilometers between 1950 and 1994. He finds that there has never been any large-scale tree death caused by acid rain. The oft-quoted, but erroneous statement about 40,000 species going extinct every year is traced by Lomborg to its source—a 20-year-old estimate that has been circulating in environmentalist circles ever since. Lomborg thinks it is closer to 1,500 species a year, and possibly a bit more than that. The documented cases of extinction during the past 400 years total just over a thousand species, of which about 95 percent are insects, bacteria, and viruses. As for the problem of garbage, the next hundred years worth of Danish refuse could be accommodated in a 33-meter-deep pit with an area of three square kilometers, even without recycling. In addition, Lomborg illustrates how increased prosperity and improved technology can solve the problems that lie ahead of us. All the fresh water consumed in the world today could be produced by a single desalination plant, powered by solar cells and occupying 0.4 percent of the Sahara Desert. It is a mistake, then, to believe that growth automatically ruins the environment. And claims that we would need this or that number of planets for the whole world to attain a Western standard of consumption—those “ecological footprint” calculations—are equally untruthful. Such a claim is usually made by environmentalists, and it is concerned, not so much with emissions and pollution, as with resources running out if everyone were to live as we do in the affluent world. Clearly, certain of the raw materials we use today, in presentday quantities, would not suffice for the whole world if everyone consumed the same things. But that information is just about as interesting as if a prosperous Stone Age man were to say that, if everyone attained his level of consumption, there would not be enough stone, salt, and furs to go around. Raw material consumption is not static. With more and more people achieving a high level of prosperity, we start looking for ways of using other raw materials. Humanity is constantly improving technology so as to get at raw materials that were previously inaccessible, and we are attaining a level of prosperity that makes this possible. New innovations make it possible for old raw materials to be put to better use and for garbage to be turned into new raw materials. A century and a half ago, oil was just something black and sticky that people preferred not to step in and definitely did not want to find beneath their land. But our interest in finding better energy sources led to methods being devised for using oil, and today it is one of our prime resources. Sand has never been all that exciting or precious, but today it is a vital raw material in the most powerful technology of our age, the computer. In the form of silicon—which makes up a quarter of the earth's crust— it is a key component in computer chips. There is a simple market mechanism that averts shortages. If a certain raw material comes to be in short supply, its price goes up. This makes everyone more interested in economizing on that resource, in finding more of it, in reusing it, and in trying to find substitutes for it. The trend over the last few decades of falling raw material prices is clear. Metals have never been as cheap as they are today. Prices are falling, which suggests that demand does not exceed supply. In relation to wages, that is, in terms of how long we must work to earn the price of a raw material, natural resources today are half as expensive as they were 50 years ago and one-fifth as expensive as they were a hundred years ago. In 1900 the price of electricity was eight times higher, the price of coal seven times higher, and the price of oil five times higher than today. 25 The risk of shortage is declining all the time, because new finds and more efficient use keep augmenting the available reserves. In a world where technology never stops developing, static calculations are uninteresting, and wrong. By simple mathematics, Lomborg establishes that if we have a raw material with a hundred years' use remaining, a 1 percent annual increase in demand, and a 2 percent increase in recycling and/or efficiency, that resource will never be exhausted. If shortages do occur, then with the right technology most substances can be recycled. One-third of the world's steel production, for example, is being reused already. Technological advance can outstrip the depletion of resources. Not many years ago, everyone was convinced of the impossibility of the whole Chinese population having telephones, because that would require several hundred million telephone operators. But the supply of manpower did not run out; technology developed instead. Then it was declared that nationwide telephony for China was physically impossible because all the world's copper wouldn't suffice for installing heavy gauge telephone lines all over the country. Before that had time to become a problem, fiber optics and satellites began to supersede copper wire. The price of copper, a commodity that people believed would run out, has fallen continuously and is now only about a tenth of what it was 200 years ago. People in most ages have worried about important raw materials becoming exhausted. But on the few occasions when this has happened, it has generally affected isolated, poor places, not open, affluent ones. To claim that people in Africa, who are dying by the thousand every day from supremely real shortages, must not be allowed to become as prosperous as we in the West because we can find theoretical risks of shortages occurring is both stupid and unjust.

Growth is good – it allows for the proliferation of technology that solves our dependence on carbon-emitters, mitigates inefficient land use, and risk of ecological collapse and resource depletion is empirically denied – failure to maintain it leads to a shift towards ecologically detrimental practices

Ridley, 4/25

(Matt, Matt Ridley's books have sold over a million copies, been translated into 30 languages, been short-listed for nine major literary prizes and won several awards. His TED talk "When Ideas Have Sex" has been viewed more than two million times.

With BA and DPhil degrees from Oxford University, he worked for the Economist for nine years as science editor, Washington correspondent and American editor, before becoming a self-employed writer and businessman. He was founding chairman of the International Centre for Life in Newcastle. He was non-excutive chairman of Northern Rock plc and Northern 2 VCT plc. He also commissioned the Northumberlandia landform sculpture and country park. He currently writes the Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal and writes regularly for The Times. As Viscount Ridley, he was elected to the House of Lords in February 2013. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Wall Street Journal, “The World’s Resources Aren’t Running Out” http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304279904579517862612287156?mod=WSJ_hp_RightTopStories&mg=reno64-wsj, April 25, 2014, ak.)

The World's Resources Aren't Running Out: Ecologists worry that the world's resources come in fixed amounts that will run out, but we have broken through such limits again and again

How many times have you heard that we humans are "using up" the world's resources, "running out" of oil, "reaching the limits" of the atmosphere's capacity to cope with pollution or "approaching the carrying capacity" of the land's ability to support a greater population? The assumption behind all such statements is that there is a fixed amount of stuff—metals, oil, clean air, land—and that we risk exhausting it through our consumption. "We are using 50% more resources than the Earth can sustainably produce, and unless we change course, that number will grow fast—by 2030, even two planets will not be enough," says Jim Leape, director general of the World Wide Fund for Nature International (formerly the World Wildlife Fund). But here's a peculiar feature of human history: We burst through such limits again and again. After all, as a Saudi oil minister once said, the Stone Age didn't end for lack of stone. Ecologists call this "niche construction"—that people (and indeed some other animals) can create new opportunities for themselves by making their habitats more productive in some way. Agriculture is the classic example of niche construction: We stopped relying on nature's bounty and substituted an artificial and much larger bounty. Economists call the same phenomenon innovation. What frustrates them about ecologists is the latter's tendency to think in terms of static limits. Ecologists can't seem to see that when whale oil starts to run out, petroleum is discovered, or that when farm yields flatten, fertilizer comes along, or that when glass fiber is invented, demand for copper falls. That frustration is heartily reciprocated. Ecologists think that economists espouse a sort of superstitious magic called "markets" or "prices" to avoid confronting the reality of limits to growth. The easiest way to raise a cheer in a conference of ecologists is to make a rude joke about economists. I have lived among both tribes. I studied various forms of ecology in an academic setting for seven years and then worked at the Economist magazine for eight years. When I was an ecologist (in the academic sense of the word, not the political one, though I also had antinuclear stickers on my car), I very much espoused the carrying-capacity viewpoint—that there were limits to growth. I nowadays lean to the view that there are no limits because we can invent new ways of doing more with less. This disagreement goes to the heart of many current political issues and explains much about why people disagree about environmental policy. In the climate debate, for example, pessimists see a limit to the atmosphere's capacity to cope with extra carbon dioxide without rapid warming. So a continuing increase in emissions if economic growth continues will eventually accelerate warming to dangerous rates. But optimists see economic growth leading to technological change that would result in the use of lower-carbon energy. That would allow warming to level off long before it does much harm. It is striking, for example, that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's recent forecast that temperatures would rise by 3.7 to 4.8 degrees Celsius compared with preindustrial levels by 2100 was based on several assumptions: little technological change, an end to the 50-year fall in population growth rates, a tripling (only) of per capita income and not much improvement in the energy efficiency of the economy. Basically, that would mean a world much like today's but with lots more people burning lots more coal and oil, leading to an increase in emissions. Most economists expect a five- or tenfold increase in income, huge changes in technology and an end to population growth by 2100: not so many more people needing much less carbon. In 1679, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, the great Dutch microscopist, estimated that the planet could hold 13.4 billion people, a number that most demographers think we may never reach. Since then, estimates have bounced around between 1 billion and 100 billion, with no sign of converging on an agreed figure. Economists point out that we keep improving the productivity of each acre of land by applying fertilizer, mechanization, pesticides and irrigation. Further innovation is bound to shift the ceiling upward. Jesse Ausubel at Rockefeller University calculates that the amount of land required to grow a given quantity of food has fallen by 65% over the past 50 years, world-wide. Ecologists object that these innovations rely on nonrenewable resources, such as oil and gas, or renewable ones that are being used up faster than they are replenished, such as aquifers. So current yields cannot be maintained, let alone improved. In his recent book "The View from Lazy Point," the ecologist Carl Safina estimates that if everybody had the living standards of Americans, we would need 2.5 Earths because the world's agricultural land just couldn't grow enough food for more than 2.5 billion people at that level of consumption. Harvard emeritus professor E.O. Wilson, one of ecology's patriarchs, reckoned that only if we all turned vegetarian could the world's farms grow enough food to support 10 billion people. Economists respond by saying that since large parts of the world, especially in Africa, have yet to gain access to fertilizer and modern farming techniques, there is no reason to think that the global land requirements for a given amount of food will cease shrinking any time soon. Indeed, Mr. Ausubel, together with his colleagues Iddo Wernick and Paul Waggoner, came to the startling conclusion that, even with generous assumptions about population growth and growing affluence leading to greater demand for meat and other luxuries, and with ungenerous assumptions about future global yield improvements, we will need less farmland in 2050 than we needed in 2000. (So long, that is, as we don't grow more biofuels on land that could be growing food.) But surely intensification of yields depends on inputs that may run out? Take water, a commodity that limits the production of food in many places. Estimates made in the 1960s and 1970s of water demand by the year 2000 proved grossly overestimated: The world used half as much water as experts had projected 30 years before. The reason was greater economy in the use of water by new irrigation techniques. Some countries, such as Israel and Cyprus, have cut water use for irrigation through the use of drip irrigation. Combine these improvements with solar-driven desalination of seawater world-wide, and it is highly unlikely that fresh water will limit human population. The best-selling book "Limits to Growth," published in 1972 by the Club of Rome (an influential global think tank), argued that we would have bumped our heads against all sorts of ceilings by now, running short of various metals, fuels, minerals and space. Why did it not happen? In a word, technology: better mining techniques, more frugal use of materials, and if scarcity causes price increases, substitution by cheaper material. We use 100 times thinner gold plating on computer connectors than we did 40 years ago. The steel content of cars and buildings keeps on falling. Until about 10 years ago, it was reasonable to expect that natural gas might run out in a few short decades and oil soon thereafter. If that were to happen, agricultural yields would plummet, and the world would be faced with a stark dilemma: Plow up all the remaining rain forest to grow food, or starve. But thanks to fracking and the shale revolution, peak oil and gas have been postponed. They will run out one day, but only in the sense that you will run out of Atlantic Ocean one day if you take a rowboat west out of a harbor in Ireland. Just as you are likely to stop rowing long before you bump into Newfoundland, so we may well find cheap substitutes for fossil fuels long before they run out. The economist and metals dealer Tim Worstall gives the example of tellurium, a key ingredient of some kinds of solar panels. Tellurium is one of the rarest elements in the Earth's crust—one atom per billion. Will it soon run out? Mr. Worstall estimates that there are 120 million tons of it, or a million years' supply altogether. It is sufficiently concentrated in the residues from refining copper ores, called copper slimes, to be worth extracting for a very long time to come. One day, it will also be recycled as old solar panels get cannibalized to make new ones. Or take phosphorus, an element vital to agricultural fertility. The richest phosphate mines, such as on the island of Nauru in the South Pacific, are all but exhausted. Does that mean the world is running out? No: There are extensive lower grade deposits, and if we get desperate, all the phosphorus atoms put into the ground over past centuries still exist, especially in the mud of estuaries. It's just a matter of concentrating them again. In 1972, the ecologist Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University came up with a simple formula called IPAT, which stated that the impact of humankind was equal to population multiplied by affluence multiplied again by technology. In other words, the damage done to Earth increases the more people there are, the richer they get and the more technology they have. Many ecologists still subscribe to this doctrine, which has attained the status of holy writ in ecology. But the past 40 years haven't been kind to it. In many respects, greater affluence and new technology have led to less human impact on the planet, not more. Richer people with new technologies tend not to collect firewood and bushmeat from natural forests; instead, they use electricity and farmed chicken—both of which need much less land. In 2006, Mr. Ausubel calculated that no country with a GDP per head greater than $4,600 has a falling stock of forest (in density as well as in acreage). Haiti is 98% deforested and literally brown on satellite images, compared with its green, well-forested neighbor, the Dominican Republic. The difference stems from Haiti's poverty, which causes it to rely on charcoal for domestic and industrial energy, whereas the Dominican Republic is wealthy enough to use fossil fuels, subsidizing propane gas for cooking fuel specifically so that people won't cut down forests. Part of the problem is that the word "consumption" means different things to the two tribes. Ecologists use it to mean "the act of using up a resource"; economists mean "the purchase of goods and services by the public" (both definitions taken from the Oxford dictionary). But in what sense is water, tellurium or phosphorus "used up" when products made with them are bought by the public? They still exist in the objects themselves or in the environment. Water returns to the environment through sewage and can be reused. Phosphorus gets recycled through compost. Tellurium is in solar panels, which can be recycled. As the economist Thomas Sowell wrote in his 1980 book "Knowledge and Decisions," "Although we speak loosely of 'production,' man neither creates nor destroys matter, but only transforms it." Given that innovation—or "niche construction"—causes ever more productivity, how do ecologists justify the claim that we are already overdrawn at the planetary bank and would need at least another planet to sustain the lifestyles of 10 billion people at U.S. standards of living? Examine the calculations done by a group called the Global Footprint Network—a think tank founded by Mathis Wackernagel in Oakland, Calif., and supported by more than 70 international environmental organizations—and it becomes clear. The group assumes that the fossil fuels burned in the pursuit of higher yields must be offset in the future by tree planting on a scale that could soak up the emitted carbon dioxide. A widely used measure of "ecological footprint" simply assumes that 54% of the acreage we need should be devoted to "carbon uptake." But what if tree planting wasn't the only way to soak up carbon dioxide? Or if trees grew faster when irrigated and fertilized so you needed fewer of them? Or if we cut emissions, as the U.S. has recently done by substituting gas for coal in electricity generation? Or if we tolerated some increase in emissions (which are measurably increasing crop yields, by the way)? Any of these factors could wipe out a huge chunk of the deemed ecological overdraft and put us back in planetary credit. Helmut Haberl of Klagenfurt University in Austria is a rare example of an ecologist who takes economics seriously. He points out that his fellow ecologists have been using "human appropriation of net primary production"—that is, the percentage of the world's green vegetation eaten or prevented from growing by us and our domestic animals—as an indicator of ecological limits to growth. Some ecologists had begun to argue that we were using half or more of all the greenery on the planet. This is wrong, says Dr. Haberl, for several reasons. First, the amount appropriated is still fairly low: About 14.2% is eaten by us and our animals, and an additional 9.6% is prevented from growing by goats and buildings, according to his estimates. Second, most economic growth happens without any greater use of biomass. Indeed, human appropriation usually declines as a country industrializes and the harvest grows—as a result of agricultural intensification rather than through plowing more land. Finally, human activities actually increase the production of green vegetation in natural ecosystems. Fertilizer taken up by crops is carried into forests and rivers by wild birds and animals, where it boosts yields of wild vegetation too (sometimes too much, causing algal blooms in water). In places like the Nile delta, wild ecosystems are more productive than they would be without human intervention, despite the fact that much of the land is used for growing human food. If I could have one wish for the Earth's environment, it would be to bring together the two tribes—to convene a grand powwow of ecologists and economists. I would pose them this simple question and not let them leave the room until they had answered it: How can innovation improve the environment?

Warming Can Be Solved Without Impairing Economic Growth

KofKoff, 2-3 [Writer and Editor at Uloop News at Columbia University, Congressional Staffer, 2-3-2014, A New Approach To Global Warming, The Bottom Line, http://www.cbs-bottomline.com/news/view.php/5665/A-New-Approach-To-Global-Warming]

I don't doubt the good intentions of those that believe global warming is an extreme threat to mankind. If you believe that global warming will ultimately lead to destruction and death it is admirable to want to do what is necessary to protect people. At the same time, it would be imprudent to ignore the virtues that have arisen from the growth of non-renewable, yet reliable, energy sources over the course of history. So here we are, attempting to fight the supposed effects of industrialization without impairing the necessary growth and improvement of the global economy. Unfortunately, the suggested cure of the day - via reductions in greenhouse gas emissions - may leave us with less growth and the environmental catastrophes we fear. Take Germany as an example of a country that takes global warming seriously. The country plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80 - 95% by 2050 versus 1990 levels. While a valiant effort no doubt, Germany only accounts for 2.3% of global emissions and will account for even less going forward as developing nations continue to grow and industrialize. It is hard to believe that Germany's actions alone can possibly thwart global warming. Their actions seem as unrealistic as if Luxembourg spent enormous sums of its GDP on its military in the hopes of ensuring world peace. At the end of the day, Luxembourg simply cannot tip the scales in any recognizable fashion. Similarly, if the US, EU, China and India are not also committed to reducing emissions, it seems that Germany's effort - which is already bearing some of the world's highest energy costs - will be for naught. The EU, following Germany's lead, recently proposed cutting its carbon emissions by 40% by 2030 from 1990 levels - an ambitious goal that the International Energy Agency supports, but admits will reduce Europe's competitiveness for at least 20-years. According to the IEA, however, even if the EU stopped emitting greenhouse gases altogether by 2030, it would not be sufficient to achieve its desired ends. As a result, if the IEA is correct, the EU's carbon austerity - at the 40% level - seems like a fool's errand. To be fair, if mankind is responsible for global warming and greenhouse gas emissions are the culprit, then directionally, less greenhouse gases are certainly better than more. But reducing emissions alone is just a means to an end - not the end itself. Ultimately the goal should be protecting the most vulnerable in the manner that results in the lowest risk-adjusted cost possible, where risk is tied to the likelihood of success. Consider telling the citizens of the Maldives that they will be better off three feet underwater rather than six. At the end of the day, if the efforts to limit global warming aren't sufficient to curtail the catastrophes many predict (ex. Low-lying areas are still flooded), the efforts will have been in vain. Granted, there will always be victories on the margin, but it does beg the question: What amount of carbon austerity and economic impact are we willing to bear in the name of global warming, and if we bear these economic hardships and the ice caps continue to melt and the temperature continues to rise, will we see it as a call for even further emissions limits or will we finally change our approach? Germany's Federal Environmental Agency says that to reduce global temperatures by 2o C, it would require global carbon reductions of 50% by 2050 versus 1990 levels. If we assume these estimates are accurate, a big if (remember in 2008 when Al Gore said the polar ice caps would be gone in 5-years?), it would still require too many variables to work out as planned for it to be achievable in a world filled with the variety of nations, economies and viewpoints of which it is currently comprised. Would it not be more effective, on a risk-adjusted basis, to focus our efforts on preparing for what we expect is to come or towards creating the innovative technology necessary to stop climate change more abruptly? Why not begin to pare back government subsidies for home insurance in flood prone areas to prod families to move towards safer zones? Or create contingency plans to conserve water in flood years for years when there are droughts? Or better yet, lift restrictions on drought-resistant genetically modified crops (queue the non-GMO hysteria!). And why not build infrastructure like flood walls in at risk areas (i.e. the Maldives, New York City, etc.) that will help to protect against rising sea levels and catastrophic natural disasters (which will happen even if global warming doesn't)? By planning for global warming rather than trying to stop global warming, either this money will be spent to defend against catastrophes that do not materialize or we will have successfully protected humanity from disaster without so severely stemming global economic growth. Conversely, we can follow the current path, imparting high cost emissions restrictions on industrialized countries and stifling the rise of resource-rich, developing nations, while hoping that our estimates are correct and that our efforts will assuage nature's fury.

Growth is Key to Solve The Consequences Of Warming

Goklany, 11 [Indur M. Goklany, Science and technology policy analyst for the United States Department of the Interior, where he holds the position of Assistant Director of Programs, Science and Technology Policy, December 2011, Misled on Climate Change: How the UN IPCC (and others) Exaggerate the Impacts of Global Warming, Reasons, http://reason.org/files/how_ipcc_misleads_on_climate_change_impacts.pdf]

Although the IPCC notes that sustainable development “can reduce vulnerability to climate change, and climate change could impede nations’ abilities to achieve sustainable development pathways,”49 many proponents of greenhouse gas controls dwell only on the latter (downside) aspect of economic development while generally ignoring the upside.50 But does global warming hinder sustained development or does sustained development make it easier to cope with warming, and which effect, if either, is predominant? It is possible to answer these questions using results from the previously discussed British government-sponsored “Fast Track Assessments” (FTAs) of the global impacts of global warming.51 The FTAs provide estimates of the contribution of global warming to the total populations at risk of malaria, hunger and coastal flooding due to sea level rise for 2085. Notwithstanding the implausibility of any forecast of events in 2085, these estimates of populations at risk may be converted into mortality estimates by comparing historical mortality estimates from the World Health Organization (for 1990, the base year) against FTA estimates of populations at risk for that year. The results indicate that under the IPCC’s warmest (A1FI) scenario, global warming would contribute no more than 13% of the total mortality from malaria, hunger and coastal flooding in 2085.52 The remaining 87% or more is due to non-global warming related factors. Had improvements in adaptive capacity been appropriately accounted for, the mortality attributed to both global warming and non-global warming factors would have been much smaller, but probably by a similar amount, so the proportional contribution from each would likely not be changed much. FTA results also indicate that by 2085, global warming would reduce the global population at risk of water shortages, although some areas would see increases.53 This finding is contrary to the erroneous impression conveyed by the IPCC’s AR4’s Working Group II Summary for Policy Makers54 because that summary emphasizes the number of people that may experience an increase in water shortage but neglects to provide corresponding estimates for the number that would see a reduction in water shortage.55 However, the finding that the net population experiencing water shortage would be reduced is consistent with other studies of the global impact of global warming on water resources. Remarkably, this result is obtained despite the fact that the author of the study does not allow for any adaptation and, consequently, nor does it account for advances in adaptive capacity that should logically occur under the IPCC scenarios.57 Had adaptation been considered, the net population at risk of water shortage due to global warming would have decreased even more substantially than the author indicates. Partly due to increases in net primary productivity because of CO2 fertilization, the amount of habitat devoted to cropland would be halved by global warming under the A1FI scenario, at least through 2100.58 Since diversion of habitat to cropland is perhaps the single largest threat to species and ecosystems, 59 this means that global warming could actually reduce pressures on biodiversity.60 Thus, at least through 2085–2100, GW may relieve some of the problems that some poor countries face currently (e.g., water shortage and habitat loss), while in other instances, the contribution of GW to the overall problem (e.g., cumulative mortality from malaria, hunger and coastal flooding) would be substantially smaller than that of non-GW related factors. Notably, economic development, one of the fundamental drivers of GW, would reduce mortality problems regardless of whether they are due to GW or non-GW related factors (see Figure 4). Hence, lack of economic development would be a greater problem than global warming, at least through 2085–2100. This reaffirms the story told by Figure 6, which shows that notwithstanding global warming and despite egregiously overestimating the negative consequences of global warming while underestimating its positive impacts, future net GDP per capita will be much higher than it is today under each scenario through at least 2200. Note that Figure 6 also shows that through 2200, notwithstanding global warming, net GDP per capita will be highest under the warmest scenario, and lowest under the poorest scenario (A2). This suggests that if humanity has a choice of which development path to take, it ought to strive to effect the scenario that has the highest economic growth, whether or not that exacerbates global warming.61 The additional economic development would more than offset the cost of any warming. No less important, it is far cheaper for the world to advance economic development than mitigate climate change by a meaningful amount.62 This is consistent with the aforementioned analysis of various climate-sensitive infectious diseases, whose authors observe that: [D]eaths will first increase, because of population growth and climate change, but then fall, because of development … As climate can only be changed with a substantial delay, development is the preferred strategy to reduce infectious diseases even if they are exacerbated by climate change. Development can … increase the capacity to cope with projected increases in infectious diseases over the medium to long term.63 Thus, it is most unlikely that under the IPCC’s warmest scenario, global warming will overwhelm economic development in countries that are currently poor, regardless of the Stern Review’s upper bound damage estimates. Second, economic development should be given priority over reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It would enable poorer countries to cope not only with any negative impacts of climate change, but more importantly, other larger problems that they will face.64 This is most obvious from an examination of Figures 3 through 5, which indicate that malnutrition, infant mortality and life expectancy improve most rapidly with economic development at its lowest levels.

Economic Growth Is The Solution to Climate Change

Worstall, 11 [Tim Worstall, Writer on Economics at Forbes, 8-10-2011, Solving Climate Change, Forbes, http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2011/08/10/solving-climate-change/]

We know very well that there’s a connection between economic growth and population size. Richer countries on average have lower fertility rates so as the world becomes richer fewer children are born. So more economic growth leading to peaking and declining population really isn’t a surprise at all. However, look at that light green line. The RCP 2.6 one, the “whew, we dodged it” one. The highest economic growth model leads to the lowest level of emissions considered. Less economic growth leads to higher emissions. Note again that these are not my assumptions. They are those of the IPCC process. Which is something of a body blow to those telling us that we must cease economic growth if calamity is to be averted: the very assumptions built into the whole proof that climate change is something we should worry about say exactly the opposite. Economic growth is the way out, not the problem. By the way, the assumption there about the rate of economic growth, from a roughly $50 trillion global economy in 2000 to a roughly $300 trillion one in 2100. That’s not all that far off the growth rate we had in the 20th century. This is how much energy we’re going to use and where we’re going to get it from. We need to be more parsimonious in our use of energy, yes. We need to use less of it per unit of GDP (which is known as “energy intensity” and their desired decrease in that isn’t far off what the advanced economies already manage) but we don’t actually need to use less of it overall. Less oil, yes, but we can near double our energy consumption and still hit that “we missed the problem” sweet spot. It’s also amusing to note what a small role for solar and wind power is necessary to hit that target. Again, I want to point out that these aren’t my assumptions, they’re not made up out of whole cloth by some denialist, these are the assumptions which the very scientists who tell us about climate change themselves think are the driving forces and likely outcomes. Which leads to a very interesting conclusion indeed. We don’t have to stop economic growth at all, we can quite happily have around the same amount of it that we had in the 20 th century. So that’s a large number of the Green Miserablists shown to be wrong. We don’t have to reduce or even severely limit our energy consumption: we just have to get the growth in our consumption from other than the usual sources. A large number of the Energy Miserablists shown to be wrong there too. Or, to boil it right down, the IPCC is telling us that the solution to climate change is economic growth and low-carbon energy generation. That’s absolutely all we have to do.

Economic Growth is The Way Out of Warming – IPCC Proves

GWPF, 11 [The Global Warming Policy Foundation, 10-08-11, IPCC: ONLY ECONOMIC GROWTH CAN SOLVE CLIMATE AND ENERGY CHALLENGES, http://www.thegwpf.org/ipcc-only-economic-growth-can-solve-climate-and-energy-challenges/]

The IPCC process has just released their first update to these models since 2000. The overview paper is here. I’m not going to delve into all of the details (for which readers will no doubt than me) I just wanted to make a few general points with the use of a couple of their graphs. As a handy guide, “RCPnumber” should be interpreted thusly: the higher the number after the RCP the closer we are to boiling Flipper as the last humans fight on the desert shores of Antarctica. The lower the number the more we can say, “Phew, we dodged the problem”. More specifically, RCP2.6 means CO2 peaks out at 490 ppm and then declines. RCP8.5 means it gets to 1370 ppm and perhaps keeps going leading to that dolphin BBQ. Note please that I don’t have to believe these numbers, you don’t, no one has to believe any of this at all. However, we do need to realise that these are the numbers which are being fed into the climate change models (perhaps more accurately, that these are the numbers that will be) and thus produce those IPCC reports. Which means that anyone taking the outputs of those IPCC reports seriously needs to take these inputs seriously. My general points can be made quite simply with the aid of two of their charts.We know very well that there’s a connection between economic growth and population size. Richer countries on average have lower fertility rates so as the world becomes richer fewer children are born. So more economic growth leading to peaking and declining population really isn’t a surprise at all. However, look at that light green line. The RCP 2.6 one, the “whew, we dodged it” one. The highest economic growth model leads to the lowest level of emissions considered. Less economic growth leads to higher emissions. Note again that these are not my assumptions. They are those of the IPCC process. Which is something of a body blow to those telling us that we must cease economic growth if calamity is to be averted: the very assumptions built into the whole proof that climate change is something we should worry about say exactly the opposite. Economic growth is the way out, not the problem. By the way, the assumption there about the rate of economic growth, from a roughly $50 trillion global economy in 2000 to a roughly $300 trillion one in 2100. That’s not all that far off the growth rate we had in the 20th century

Global Warming can be Solved without Drastic Burdens on The Economy

Siegel, 07 [Jeremy J. Siegel, Professor of Finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, October 2007, How to End Global Warming, Going Green, http://m.kiplinger.com/article/investing/T038-C000-S002-how-to-end-global-warming.html]

The mere mention of global warming raises the temperature level of political discourse. On one side, many conservatives concede that the earth is getting warmer, but they do not believe that human activity is necessarily the cause -- and even if it is, they argue, there's little we can do about it. On the other side, some environmentalists believe that radical measures are called for -- measures that could grind economic growth to a halt. Unfortunately, all the heated rhetoric obscures some viable, middle-of-the-road approaches. I strongly believe in the power of free markets, and I think we can use free-market solutions to attack global warming without imposing an undue burden on the world economy. Key facts I believe that global warming is real, that it stems mostly from the increase in greenhouse gases and that it does pose a long-term threat. The basic facts are well known. The world is pumping about 8 billion tons of carbon emissions from fossil fuels into the atmosphere each year, up nearly 500% from 1950. That number is likely to double by mid century if nothing is done to curtail emissions. Global warming is expected to accentuate climatic extremes. Some areas of the world, particularly those in the far north, may benefit as the length of growing seasons increases. But warming is likely to bring excessive rain to some regions and drought to others. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) expects an increase in the frequency of major cyclonic storms, such as the intense hurricanes that hit the Gulf Coast in 2005. In my opinion, the most costly consequence of global warming is the possibility of rising ocean levels caused by melting ice and the expansion of warming water. Sea levels would rise by 23 feet if all of Greenland's ice sheet melted, and another 230 feet if all of Antarctica's ice melted. The latter scenario would submerge more than half the world's population. The IPCC predicts that sea levels will rise only 7 inches to 2 feet by the end of this century, although it is said the figure could be much greater, depending on ice-flow dynamics and other factors. But even modest melting could trigger climate changes that would make many of the world's largest cities uninhabitable and dramatically reduce the world's arable land. Many believe that any attempt to curtail carbon emissions will sharply reduce economic growth and cause severe economic hardships. I disagree. For starters, one study has shown that just by using today's technologies, it would be possible to reduce emissions by several billion tons per year without doing much harm to world economic output. This could be accomplished by increasing the amount of electricity produced at nuclear-power plants, doubling the fuel efficiency of automobiles and using more-energy-efficient technologies in buildings. Consider the energy-efficiency improvements in California, which has the toughest environmental laws in the country. On a per-person basis, Californians use about one-third less energy than the average American and emit only about half as much carbon dioxide. Yes, energy prices are high in California, but no one I know would call the state impoverished because of its energy-saving initiatives.

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