Construction projects prepare the tropical city of Belém, Brazil for more than 50,000 delegates to this year's big Climate Conference. Photo: Rafael Medelima for COP30.
Socialists and authoritarians like themselves a great big "negative externality". It gives them an excuse to demand government intervention that serves to restrain free economic activity, take the rich down a few notches, and punish corporations for making profits.
The problem with many externalities, however, is that they are often vaguely defined, their damage hard to quantify, the culpable party hard to collar, and the putative victims difficult to identify.
"An appeal to externalities," I wrote as a younger man, "is an admission that you're unable to prove who caused the harm, how they caused the harm, what harm was caused, to whom the harm was caused, how much harm was caused, or how future harm can best be prevented. Inability to demonstrate any or all of these offers no legal or moral basis for violating the rights of free people by coercive government intervention."
Implicating everyone
Climate change is the biggest negative externality of all. It implicates virtually all energy-consuming production, across the entire economy. Its mitigitation requires interventions that affect all people, and control all their economic activity.
It turns human consumption and the desire to improve living standards into original sin. It comprehensively condemns capitalism, and although socialism in reality has a far worse environmental record, creates a pretext for elaborate authoritarian restraints on people as both consumers and producers.
It is also a wonderful money-spinner if you're in the business of climate research, climate advocacy, climate consultancy, or "green" technology.
Any research grant request can be improved immeasurably by adding "and its impact on climate change", or "and how climate change impacts it". Any sales pitch can be improved by adding "and it helps prevent climate change". Any appeal for donations can be improved by adding "your money will help us fight climate change". Any prospectus for investment can be improved by adding "and this technology will reduce carbon emissions".
The belief that environmentalists and climate activists are any less profit-motivated than hard-nosed capitalists is patently wrong.
Real or exaggerated
To what extent the problem is real or exaggerated is a moot point. Among Gen Z, half of all survey respondents believe themselves to be "greatly personally affected" by climate change. Absurd though this belief might be, it isn't one that can be changed by getting waist-deep in the gory (and often dubious) details of global temperature estimates and speculation about their future impacts.
Personally, I believe that human activities do have an effect on the climate, but that there is far too much uncertainty at every step of the scientific process - from data collection, to adjustment, to interdisciplinary research consolidation, to analysis, to model construction, and to forecasting, to predict future climate with any degree of certainty.
That climate policy is here to stay is a given. This raises the question of what the least damaging (and hopefully most advantageous) climate policy would be.
Mitigation
The notion of mitigation - reducing carbon dioxide emissions in the hope of reducing greenhouse warming of the atmosphere - has always been problematic.
The expense of mitigation - driving net emissions down to zero in a matter of two or three decades - is enormous. While the nominal financial cost will be borne primarily by rich countries, the hardship in terms of forgone economic development falls more heavily on the less developed countries that least contributed to emissions in the past.
The effect of mitigation - the amount by which anticipated warming would be reduced by the end of the century - is minimal and speculative.
In short, to the extent that we can take a guess at the economic cost-benefit ratio of climate mitigation (and some say it isn't possible to do that at all), mitigation is a bad deal.
Almost every other potential intervention designed to solve critical global problems has a better return on investment in terms of lives saved per dollar spent.
It is also morally fraught, because it forces more expensive, less plentiful, and unreliable energy upon those countries that most need cheap, abundant energy to achieve the levels of human prosperity that the rich world has already achieved.
COP30
That brings us to the latest annual Conference of the Parties (COP) to the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC). This, the thirtieth, was held (perhaps intentionally) just a degree and a half south of the equator, in Belém, Brazil.
The climate in Belém is tropical. It is hot, wet and humid. November is the end of its "dry" season, with a mean rainfall of "only" 150mm. November is the hottest month of the year, with a mean daily temperature of 27.4°C, which is hardly any hotter than the coldest month of the year, at a mean of 26.1°C. Maximum temperatures well over 30°C are the norm, throughout the year.
It's a great place for 56,118 of the world's great and good, all arriving by aeroplane, and many by private jet, to luxuriate at Belém's hotels and resorts to discuss "global heating" over canapés and cocktails, then.
Of the 198 parties to the FCCC, only San Marino, Afghanistan, Myanmar, and the great ol' United States of America were absent.
South Africa sent 116 people, of which 77 were attached to the official party delegation. Notably larger delegations from African countries came from Nigeria (749), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (556), Chad (528) and Tanzania (465).
Little of note
The vast amount of money spent on this jamboree produced little of note. The parties could not agree on much.
The final statement, known as the Mutirão text (from the Tupi-Guarani word for "collective efforts"), did a lot of acknowledging, being mindful of, welcoming with appreciation, and recalling with concern, but the words "fossil fuels" didn't even make it into the document.
There was no roadmap to transitioning away from carbon-based fuels, because only 80 out of the 194 delegations could agree on that. There was no roadmap to halting deforestation, either.
It does a lot of "calling upon", "emphasising," and "urging", but very little "committing" and "deciding". What decisions were taken amount largely to future discussions, and what commitments were offered were non-binding.
Despite attempts by climate change NGOs to put a positive spin on it, COP30 was yet another damp squib, with nothing of substance that commits nations to climate mitigation policies.
Adaptation
This is not a bad outcome. Widespread agreement to use government force to curb the use of cheap, reliable and abundant energy in pursuit of highly doubtful benefits several generations hence would have been a much worse result.
Instead, COP30 called for adaptation finance to developing countries to be tripled by 2035. This is a longer timeline than activists (and the recipient countries) had hoped for, but it should redirect a large share of the total climate finance for developing countries (if they ever get it) towards adaptation rather than mitigation.
In principle, no market intervention is ideal, but directing taxpayer money from rich countries to adaptation in poor countries, to address the actual risks presented by climate instead of merely preventing carbon emissions, could have some positive externalities.
Adaptation is far more cost-effective than mitigation. Adaptation also helps guard against weather extremes that are not associated with climate change, such as the floods, storms and droughts that nature has always flung at humanity's productive efforts.
If some of that money finds its way to basic research and development, we might expect even more positive spin-offs. It might be fairly useless to go to the moon, but it did give us teflon. A lot of green tech might be over-hyped idealism, but it does give us better batteries and more efficient electronic devices.
Out of steam
The change of focus, away from targeting fossil fuel use, and towards long-term adaptation to climate-related events, is a positive development.
It gives developing countries the latitude they need to develop their economies and pull their people out of poverty in the most cost-effective way possible, instead of in more expensive ways dictated by the emission-reduction demands of rich countries.
People will always want cleaner industries and more efficient use of energy, and there's nothing wrong with that. In fact, it should be encouraged. But it should not be enforced.
Evidence shows that the more prosperous societies get, the more they care - and can afford to care - about environmental issues. The priority, then, should be to generate prosperity.
Inasmuch as climate activists, environmental alarmists and the green industry are failing to convince governments to exert ever more authoritarian control over the world's people and their productive activities, I would chalk COP30 up as a win for people, the environment, and liberty.
[Image: https://politicabrasileira.com.br/politicas-publicas/sociedade-civil-pode-se-candidatar-para-delegacao-brasileira-na-cop30-ate-esta-terca-30/]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
If you like what you have just read, support the Daily Friend