Biography
Biography: Christopher Monckton
Abstract
Though the social cost of carbon is erroneously thought to be $30-50/te, the benefits of CO2 outweigh its costs. The use of integrated assessment models has led to grave errors in intertemporal appraisals of the relative merits of mitigation and adaptation. Also, three long-standing errors in the official climate-sensitivity equations require correction, halving the central estimate and reducing the high-end estimate by two-thirds, in line with measured warming. The new method combines the corrected sensitivity equations with standard intertemporal investment-appraisal methodology. It reveals how much global warming any proposed CO2-mitigation policy may abate; the cash, per-capita, and global-GDP cost of abating all global warming from the present to a target year by measures of the same unit abatement cost as the proposed policy; that policy’s unit abatement cost in dollars per Kelvin of warming abated; and the cost/benefit ratio. Case studies illustrating the method’s utility in comparing policy options indicate that government economic projections – often owing to confirmation, partisan-political, rent-seeker, racketeer or noble-cause biases – tend greatly to understate the cost of climate action and as greatly to overstate the imagined welfare loss from inaction. Focused adaptation will, therefore, prove cheaper than attempted mitigation, even if the officially-predicted rate of global warming eventually occurs. Given the small and slow warming now to be expected, commercial discount rates and not artificially-diminished “save-the-planet” discount rates are appropriate. The low energy-density of “renewable” generation causes more environmental damage per TWh generated than fossil generation. No mitigation strategy will be cost-effective solely on grounds of the global net welfare benefit foreseeable from CO2 mitigation alone. Mitigation strategies inexpensive enough to be affordable will be ineffective: strategies costly enough to be effective will be unaffordable. Inaction on greenhouse-gas emissions is the rational economic choice.