The Paris Climate Agreement has been hailed by environmentalists as this sort of Holy Grail to fight climate change, but in actuality the Paris Climate Accord will do very little to change the climate.
Bjorn Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Consensus Centre, explains in Prager University’s latest video that the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Clean Power Plan regulation “would reduce the temperature increase in 2100 by just 0.023 degrees Fahrenheit,” according to the United Nation’s climate model. Obama’s future pledges of carbon dioxide reductions would only raise that total to 0.057 degrees.
Should other countries abide by the accord, there would only be a 0.3 degree decline in temperature over the next century, meaning that global warming would only be postponed for “less than four years.”
This is significant because despite the minimal effect on the climate, the Paris Climate Accord would result in serious economic calamity.
“The cost of the Paris climate pact is likely to run to 1 to 2 trillion dollars every year, based on estimates produced by the Stanford Energy Modeling Forum and the Asia Modeling Exercise,” Lomborg said. “In other words, we will spend at least one hundred trillion dollars in order to reduce the temperature, by the end of the century, by a grand total of three tenths of one degree.”
While some argue that the Paris Climate Accord would reduce temperatures by 1.6 degrees Farenheit, Lomborg explains that such a number is pure fiction:
But this prediction is based very heavily on the assumption that even stronger climate policies will be adopted in the future. Actually, 98% of the assumed reductions will come only after 2030, which is what the current Paris agreement covers. And even such wishful thinking won’t achieve anything close to the 2 degrees Celsius reduction that has become the somewhat arbitrary, but widely adopted, benchmark to avoid the worst effects of global warming. The actual promised emission reductions under the Paris agreement literally get us just 1 percent of the way to the 2 degrees target. 99 percent of what would be required is put off until after 2030.
Instead, Lomborg argues that the true solutions to climate change lie in the private sector with efforts like hydraulic fracturing to make energy sources that emit less carbon dioxide more economically viable.
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