The climate change solutions would make things worse for more people

Bjorn Lomborg:

When a “solution” to a problem causes more damage than the problem, policymaking has gone awry. That’s where we often find ourselves with global warming today.

Activist organizations like Worldwatch argue that higher temperatures will make more people hungry, so drastic carbon cuts are needed. But a comprehensive new study published in Nature Climate Change led by researchers from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis has found that strong global climate action would cause far more hunger and food insecurity than climate change itself.

The scientists used eight global-agricultural models to analyze various scenarios between now and 2050. These models suggest, on average, that climate change could put an extra 24 million people at risk of hunger. But a global carbon tax would increase food prices and push 78 million more people into risk of hunger. The areas expected to be most vulnerable are sub-Saharan Africa and India.

Trying to help 24 million people by imperiling 78 million people’s lives is a very poor policy.
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Ten years ago, a biofuels craze swept rich countries with the full-throated support of green activists who hailed any shift away from fossil fuels. Food crops were replaced to produce ethanol, and the resulting spike in food prices forced at least 30 million people into poverty and 30 million more into hunger, according to UK charity ActionAid.
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The Doha free-trade deal was allowed to collapse with just a fraction of the attention given to global climate-change negotiations.

Reviving Doha would lift an extra 145 million people out of poverty by 2030, according to research commissioned by Copenhagen Consensus. It could make the average person in the developing world $1,000 better off every year — allowing them to not only better feed themselves and their children, but also afford better health care, more education and lead more prosperous lives.

The EU’s climate policy under the Paris agreement, meanwhile, will realistically cost the bloc about $600 billion each year for the rest of the century, yet at best it delivers a trifling temperature reduction of just 0.09°F by the end of the century.

When comparing the massive cost with the slight delay in climate damage, each dollar spent delivers just three cents of climate benefits — i.e., lower hurricane damage, fewer heat waves, less agricultural stress.
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This does not even mention all the money wasted on alternative energy which is much less efficient and less dependable, particularly in extreme weather.   Add to this the fact that most of the projections of global warming have cooked the books to make it look worse than it actually has been to date.  Other studies have shown that the increased C02 will actual green the planet and make it more fertile.