Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to a new study, poor countries are enjoying economic growth, but by comparing observations to a hypothetical growth rate which could have been achieved without climate change, study authors concluded that climate change is slowing progress.
Climate Change Has Already Increased Global Inequality. It Will Only Get Worse
BY JUSTIN WORLAND
APRIL 22, 2019…
A study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science found that in most poor countries, higher temperatures are more than 90% likely to have resulted in decreased economic output, compared to a world without global warming. Meanwhile, the effect has been less dramatic in wealthier nations—with some even potentially benefiting from higher temperatures.
“We’re not arguing that global warming created inequality,” says Noah S. Diffenbaugh, the author of the study and a professor at Stanford University who studies climate change. But “global warming has put a drag on improvement.” The countries most likely to have lost out economically as a result of warmer temperatures have done the least to contribute to the problem, he adds.
…
Many of the world’s developing countries have called foul. “This problem is created somewhere else,” Abdur Rouf Talukder, Bangladesh’s Finance Secretary, told TIME earlier this month. “We are spending more on adaptation because we have to live.”
Bangladesh’s GDP per capita was 12% lower due to global warming than it would have been otherwise in the two decades preceding 2010, according to the study published Monday. The effect is more dramatic elsewhere, particularly in sub-Saharan African countries including Sudan, Burkina Faso and Niger, where climate change has driven GDP per capita more than 20% lower that it would have been absent climate change.
…
Read more: http://time.com/5575523/climate-change-inequality/
The abstract of the study;
Global warming has increased global economic inequality
Noah S. Diffenbaugh and Marshall Burke
PNAS first published April 22, 2019 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1816020116Understanding the causes of economic inequality is critical for achieving equitable economic development. To investigate whether global warming has affected the recent evolution of inequality, we combine counterfactual historical temperature trajectories from a suite of global climate models with extensively replicated empirical evidence of the relationship between historical temperature fluctuations and economic growth. Together, these allow us to generate probabilistic country-level estimates of the influence of anthropogenic climate forcing on historical economic output. We find very high likelihood that anthropogenic climate forcing has increased economic inequality between countries. For example, per capita gross domestic product (GDP) has been reduced 17–31% at the poorest four deciles of the population-weighted country-level per capita GDP distribution, yielding a ratio between the top and bottom deciles that is 25% larger than in a world without global warming. As a result, although between-country inequality has decreased over the past half century, there is ∼90% likelihood that global warming has slowed that decrease. The primary driver is the parabolic relationship between temperature and economic growth, with warming increasing growth in cool countries and decreasing growth in warm countries. Although there is uncertainty in whether historical warming has benefited some temperate, rich countries, for most poor countries there is >90% likelihood that per capita GDP is lower today than if global warming had not occurred. Thus, our results show that, in addition to not sharing equally in the direct benefits of fossil fuel use, many poor countries have been significantly harmed by the warming arising from wealthy countries’ energy consumption.
Read more: https://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1816020116
Edited by Ottmar Edenhofer, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Potsdam, Germany, and accepted by Editorial Board Member Hans J. Schellnhuber March 22, 2019 (received for review September 16, 2018)
The authors don’t appear to have modelled the hypothetical impact not using fossil fuels would have had on economic development in poor countries, though perhaps a follow up study in Venezuela might shed some light on this issue.
“counterfactual historical temperature trajectories from a suite of global climate models” = total BS
The Free dictionary definition-
“counterfactual” adjective
“Devoid of truth: false, specious, spurious, truthless, untrue, untruthful, wrong.”
Not even BS which stinks but at least has some solidity.
Brukina Faso, Niger, Sudan (Sub Saharan??)
Perhaps Brukina Faso is Sub Saharan but the last time I checked, Niger and Sudan were >90% contstrained to the area of the Sahara Desert.
But then Brukina Faso is also near Equatorial Africa in the Tropic Zone.
Weren’t the Equatorial and Tropical Zones supposed to be the least impacted by temperature variance related to “Climate Change”??
How are they sure that it was not civil war, conflict and terrorism which was slowing the economies in these countries? Or can we assume that conflict was also a result of warmer ( or not really warmer ) temperatures and thus still attributable to CO2?
Yeah, they could model the impact of THAT, but it wouldn’t be PC. I’m sure no “theoretical (made up) unchanged climate” would even be necessary to show the negative effects of those “phenomena.”
Oh, it’s the damned potty Potsdammers again. Don’t even bother.
for most poor countries there is >90% likelihood that per capita GDP is lower today than if global warming had not occurred
=======
Total BS. Without global warming there would be no fossil fuel. The poor countries of the world would be trying to run their country on dung.
Try and manufacture steel using dung as your energy source. Now try and make a solar panel or wind turbine using dung as your energy source.
The paper assumes you can magically eliminate the cost while maintaining the benefit.
Post modernism at its fundamental best. Truth is subjective. What is, is what we convince the majority what is to be. This fits neatly with an ex President who proclaimed, as we were entering this New Age of Post Modernism, that the truth depends on what your definition of is, is. This is all clear as mud and if you disagree they will whip together a consensus to support Is and slander and destroy any that stand against IS.
Oh! BTW. Ignore the fat bald guy. behind the curtain.
IS is what IS is…ISIS
The Stanford University used to be a good school. Do they still have at least one good professor?
Mark Zoback, geology/physics.
“total BS” gives this thing waaaay too much credibility!
The countries most likely to have lost out economically as a result of warmer temperatures have done the least to contribute to the problem, he adds.,,,,,
backwoods third world crap holes………even sending them money doesn’t help
Edited by Ottmar Edenhofer –
“But one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy…One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy any more.” —Ottmar Edenhofer, Co-chair of IPCC WG III, New American, Nov. 19, 2010
Ottmar just happens to have been influenced by Marx and Weber. Not Hubert Lamb.
…and proving the point that paying people to not work…does not work
Paying People who are “Unable to Work” (illness, Handicap, etc.) is a form of society looking after it’s less fortunate while Paying People who are “Unwilling to Work” is just a another means to completely devalue the monetary system
Giving people who can’t work, a portion of your own income is a good thing and something to be encouraged.
Voting to have government take someone else’s money and give it to those who can’t work is another form of tyranny.
Yet another unfalsifiable computer modeling waste of time and electrons.
’nuff said.
Now that all comedians are woke – assuming they want to keep working – climate science is where the laughs are.
“a hypothetical growth rate which could have been achieved without climate change”
I’d like to see what growth could have been achieved if the developing world was allowed cheap energy from fossil fuels.
The climate has always been changing and man has always adapted to it.
would these be the same predictions….
“At the start of the year, economists predicted an economic slump ahead. President Trump’s already low approval ratings were plunging. The Mueller report would threaten his presidency. And Democrats, we were told, would be driving the agenda for the next two years over a crippled presidency.”
Latitude, That was priceless! Thanks.
I agree on one point. It’s certainly ‘climate change’ and the costs of its mitigations that are inhibiting the developing world from advancing at a faster rate, but it’s the unwarranted fear of change and not actual change that’s causing all the problems. Since most of the countries on the receiving end of reparations are in tropical latitudes, where it takes more W/m^2 to sustain the same incrementally higher temperature, any average temperature differences would be imperceptible given constant pole to pole ‘forcing’ from well mixed CO2 and have no effect on the rate of development. Besides, much of the tropics are covered by water which limits the maximum sustainable temperature to only about 300K (80F) and which moderates the rest of the average tropical temperatures.
Global poverty has declined markedly. Of course, that doesn’t suit the left. link
Actually they have addressed it in their paper, but in classic climate cult fashion.
“Likewise, not only have poor countries not shared in the full benefits of energy consumption, but many have already been made poorer (in relative terms) by the energy consumption of wealthy countries.”
So you see, if it wasn’t for wealthy nations doing human things like inventing and innovating, we would be just as poor as other nations, and that would be economic justice and good, according to the climate cult of zero worship.
Pretty silly … the authors apparently believe that energy use is a zero sum game – i.e., that every KW-hr we advanced nations consume is a KW-hr that poor goatherders in the horn of Africa or tribesmen in the Amazon jungles would otherwise have used to power their 21st century economies.
Laughable.
Typical left it is always the developed nations fault that poor countries are poor and 3rd world.
Wow!
A whole new model of modeled climate effects…
BARF!
Sorry, ‘cuse me, but I feel better now.
Have fun with this one !
https://theintercept.com/2019/04/17/green-new-deal-short-film-alexandria-ocasio-cortez/?fbclid=IwAR1GiJr7YMoeGWmP7SjIrVI9RrrHrnALRo4FGdk8Z-3–GPE0U_q7ZNhl7A
The Earth’s climate has been changing for eons and most of that change was before mankind evolved. According to the paleoclimate record and the work done with models, the climate change we are experiencing today is caused by the sun and the oceans over which mankind has no control. The climate change we are experiencing is so small that it takes networks of very sophisticated sensors, decades to even detect it. We have to be careful not to mix up weather cycles that are part of the current climate with true climate change. Despite the hype, there is no real evidence that CO2 has any effect on climate and there is plenty of scientific rationale to support the idea that the climate sensitivity of CO2 is zero.
AGW is a conjecture that depends upon the existence of radiant greenhouse effect in the Earth’s atmosphere provided for by trace gases with LWIR absorption bands. AGW at first seems to be quite plausible but a more in depth analysis uncovers that AGW is bases on only partial science and is full of holes. For example, the radiant greenhouse effect has not been observed in a real greenhouse, in the Earth’s atmosphere, or anywhere else in the solar system for that matter. The radiant greenhouse effect is science fiction so hence that AGW conjecture is science fiction as well. It is true that the so called greenhouse gases absorb LWIR absorption band radiation but that does not mean the they hence trap heat energy because what they absorb they very quickly radiate away. Good absorbers are also good radiators and the primary mode of heat energy transfer in the troposphere is by means other than LWIR absorption band radiation. It would be the non-greenhouse gases that are more apt to trap heat energy because they are such poor radiators to space compared to the so called greenhouse gases. The AGW conjecture has got things backwards.
Since the AGW conjecture is nothing but science fiction, all papers and studies that use the AGW conjecture as a basic assumption are nothing but science fiction as well.
The earth doesn’t have a climate.
This is nothing but class/race baiting – kinda like attaching reparations to climate change legislation – another effort to simply buy support.
Noah S. Diffenbaugh and Marshall Burke
“…. these allow us to generate probabilistic country-level estimates of the influence of anthropogenic climate forcing on historical economic output.”
‘garbage in garbage out”
Yup, it’s garbage all the way down.
Understanding the causes of economic inequality is critical for achieving equitable economic development. To investigate whether global warming has affected the recent evolution of inequality…
So they don’t understand what causes income inequality? Are they daft? It’s clear from the start that the authors don’t have a clue about wealth or where it comes from and how it’s achieved or what it represents. The entire paper ignores factual explanations for income inequality, and frames the entire issue as a matter of climate change.
Sometimes the best way to show how dumb something is, is to play along. Since this paper has found that it is climate change that is preventing poor countries from becoming rich, you could bolster the argument by taking wealth inequality data and work backwards to find out how much ‘negative’ climate change that area has had.
My study is in the preliminary stages, but I have found that there is drastic negative climate change on the west side of Hispaniola, but that east side has seen some of that positive climate change. Mexico has seen bad climate change on its border with Central America but the resort areas in the Yucatan and along the US border have seen good climate change.
In the US, there is minor bad climate change in Mississippi alone but everywhere else has seen that good climate stuff. It’s been misreported that the Middle East has seen nasty climate change, when in fact all that has disproportionately occurred in Yemen with the rest of the Middle East having mostly good climate change. The Korean Peninsula has seen a mixed bag of climate change, with the north side of the peninsula undergoing dire climageddon and the south side seeing climate paradise.
But perhaps the most surprising find was the magnitude of bad climate change happening in the small nation of Lesotho while South Africa, which surrounds all of Lesotho, has seen positive climate change, which serves as a perfect example of how selective the demon CO2 is when selecting where to send the bad climate.
Robert W Turner: “[…] you could bolster the argument by taking wealth inequality data and work backwards to find out how much ‘negative’ climate change that area has had.”
Brilliant, Robert! The Climastrologists have been going about it exactly backwards all along. They don’t need climate models at all. They can just use economic data and it will spit out the climate change that has occurred.
[Smacks forehead] It’s perfectly obvious now that you’ve pointed it out.
Goodbye, Climate Modelers.
Hello, Marxist Economists.
The Lesotho experience also provides an answer to that perplexing problem of “hottest years” being totally influenced by El Nino events. Atmospheric carbon dioxide appears to be able to gang up on certain areas of ocean. Not only is this evident in the temperature record, but also in economics. For example from Wikipedia:
“The IMF estimates a significant El Niño can boost the GDP of the United States by about 0.5% (due largely to lower heating bills) and reduce the GDP of Indonesia by about 1.0%.”
So these authors are clearly onto something.
The World Bank’s executive board has unanimously approved President Trump’s nominee David Malpass as its new president. David Malpass is in a position to have more positive impact on ‘global inequality’ than the negative effects of fictional man-made Climate Change ever will.
I nominate Justin Worland for the Convoluted Logic of the Year Award. This guy even makes Griff seem level headed by comparison.
Coincidence? The world-wide IQ level has been decreasing at he same time and close to the same rate as the climate induced GDP rate is suggest to produce. Klu Klux Klan talking point? Try CNN, June 14, 2018: IQ scores decline post 1975. Some people don’t like it but the John Wayne “Old Guys Rule” t-shirt says: Life is tough. It’s tougher if you’re stupid. Climate change? Yes. Relevance? None.
Stanford material?
http://www.lamebook.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/life-is-though.jpg
‘Inequality’ is totalist language.
Robert W Turner
April 23, 2019 at 12:16 pm
Understanding the causes of economic inequality is critical for achieving equitable economic development.
Seriously, Bob, DON’T PLAY THEIR GAME!
‘Milton Friedman. “The society that puts equality before freedom will end up with neither. The society that puts freedom before equality will end up with a great measure of both. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.”
Which is why Socialists are for equality, freedom not being their cup of tea, Comrade.
“Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom, socialism restricts it. Democracy attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville
“All men are born with different capabilities; if they are free, they are not equal; if they are equal, they are not free.” – Solzhenitsyn
Equality, in the sense they use it, is BAD. Ending ‘inequality’ will be the end of Western Civilization. ‘Inequality’ is a tool being used against you. They fight against your freedom; don’t help them.
critical for achieving equitable economic development
≠======
In a classroom every student has equal opportunity. If the lesson moves at the speed of the least capable student you have equality of result. The class learns next to nothing and the most capable students are bored to tears and start causing trouble.
Climate change is not the reason that Bangladesh lags America in economic development. You cannot boost Bangladesh to America’s standard of development, short of discovering an ultra rich gold deposit. All you can do is bring America down to the level of Bangladesh by crippling US energy supplies.
Ferd, I can find gold deposits with the best of them, but if I was ordered to Bangladesh to find gold I’d be forced to go into hiding. So good luck to them, they need to focus on their agriculture and some oil and gas potential.
Bangladesh has made great strides economically in the last 20 years.
Global idiocy is clearly empowered due to “global warming”.
What has been the change responsible for the adverse effects? In Burkena Faso for example, the country’s temperature has fluctuated slowly up and down about +/- 0.5C since 1900 with no apparent trend as has rainfall (https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2012/3084/fs2012-3084.pdf). I find that sometimes, data can be useful for sorting problems, perceived or otherwise. I am surprised that Stanford University has yet to discover this useful practice.
It says right in the paper, climate change, and more specifically negative climate change. The warmer nights at the North Pole in the northern winter cause bad economies in Burkena Faso, don’t you get it? You’ve got to be that Stanford level smart to understand this stuff.
It’s so nice to know that there is such a simple, easy solution to all the world’s ills: Marxist socialism, solar panels and wind turbines. I have little doubt they could create a computer model to confirm it. /sarc
I noticed this “study” appeared on Time magazine’s website. Enough said.
It is a review of a study published in PNAS. Also scientific.
I think they’ll find if they followed the climate change theories and cut anthropogenic CO2 to pre-industrial levels, everywhere from 1960 would have shrunk dramatically compared to today.
Eric added at the end in his comments, ”
The authors don’t appear to have modeled the hypothetical impact not using fossil fuels would have had on economic development in poor countries, though perhaps a follow up study in Venezuela might shed some light on this issue.”
Eric, it is far worse than that. Not just impact “in poor countries” but in every country.
Question: What would the US or EU’s GDP per capita have been if fossil fuel emissions had been zero?
For that to be true, it would also have meant fossil fuel use would have been zero. And because of the state of technology of most of that timeperiod in question it would have meant no energy except for some electrical from hydro and nuclear. There would have been no mechanized agriculture, no bulk transport of raw material or finished products except by animals. We know on both continents where those conditions applied.
So Yes, we know that answer:
The US’s GDP per capita would have been on par with Haiti’s.
The EU’s GDP per capita would have been on par with Albania.
In their Methods they describe their income inequality measures,
“We measure global economic inequality using the ratio of the top and bottom decile (“90:10 ratio”) and top and bottom quintile (“80:20 ratio”) of the population-weighted country-level per capita GDP distribution.”
Their fundamental, basic assumption is that observed changes in income inequality were due to the observed delta Temperatures. Then they used the CMIP5 models to back out what Temps would have been without the assumed anthropogenic CO2-dependent T-rise and then used a non-linear relationship to score what the GDPs per capita and thus income inequality would have been without the warming.
So a country like Canada that improved in their income equality measure, they attribute it to Climate Change being a benefit. Where countries that went backwards in income inequality (got worse), they also attributed that also to CC. Never mind the fact that many sub-Saharan countries have regressed immensely in the post-Colonial era due to wide-spread corruption within their self-governance.
The most fundamental problem with their study is where they trivially state, “for most poor countries there is >90% likelihood that per capita GDP is lower today than if global warming had not occurred.”
That is a trivial finding because it is obvious to the casual observer that there is a 100% likelihood that per capita GDP would be much lower if fossil fuel use had been denied because of global warming scaremongering. Then income equality would have been nearly equal across all fossil fuel energy-denied countries as everyone would have shared in the misery.
This study is absurd and fundamentally ignorant on so many levels. Obviously it’s why they had to publish in PNAS via the G.O.B. network in the NAS. Climate alarmist Science mag and Nature’s various mags likely rejected this POS paper as unfit for even them.
They should have put in their Discussion the famous Winston Churchill quote,
Because Diffenbaugh and Burke hit everyone of those Churchill points by
(1) proposing a solution (energy poverty) that is a philosophy of failure, then
(2) they ignorantly made bad assumptions(temperature changes were directly causal to inequality changes), then
(3) they used income inequality to preach a gospel of envy, and finally
(4) they propose solutions (low carbon energy) which equate to equal sharing of misery.
The only thing that might be increasing economic inequality is the fact that these countries are being forced to mitigate a non existent problem at the equator where there is almost no change in the temperature because that is where the iris effect described and accepted as real operates most strongly. Besides the fact that extreme poverty has shrunk more quickly over the last 15 years than at any time in human history the model would appear to be an abject failure again!
Bangladesh, Sudan, Burkina Faso, Niger?
What is the common thread there?
A widespread militant version of a C.7th belief system, or half a degree warming (maybe) in a century plus significant greening?
Hmmmm.
A tough one.
Same grift, different day.
The knee jerk attribution of all things bad to climate change is surely the finest expression of confirmation bias in the history of science.
https://tambonthongchai.com/2018/08/03/confirmationbias/
Global inequality is worse because of socialism. Solution? Eradicate socialists. Late term abortion was created to wipeout socialists, they can be aborted at any time and place you locate them. It is the only way the human race will survive.
Remember at the first earth day the mantra was “zero population growth” ?
I suspect fertility rates since then have a higher correlation with poverty than CO2
But zpg isn’t leftist politically correct anymore.
The authors should also have modelled the impact of Global Warming Hysteria on the funding of affordable energy and electricity production in the Third World Countries. They could also model the effect of Socialist policies on countries like Cuba and Venezuela to see where the problems could be coming from. Finally, they could do a study to see if any of the Alarmist Climate Predictions have ever been realised over the past 50 years of hysteria.
Is it just me, or are the ‘airwaves’ being clogged with increasingly desperate CAGW studies/news??
One might think the CAGW bubble is near bursting….and not a moment too soon.
This is utter insanity. It is a terrible symphony of bad science, bad demographics, bad economics, and bad history. It is the synthesis of every error I was trained to detect, analyze, and avoid.
This paper was not meant for you, Evan Jones. It was meant to persuade the ignorant. It was meant to solidify social paradigms of victimhood. It was meant to build an emotional case for justifying the horrible things that are about to come.
As a scholarly work, it is as horrible as you say. As propaganda, it is beautiful.
It does not require scientific equipment to demonstrate that water vapor reduces the rate of cooling of the planet. Common knowledge will do. The simple observation that it cools faster and farther on dry, cloudless desert nights than it does where it is humid demonstrates that water vapor is a ghg and that its increase causes some Global Warming (about half of the total average global temperature increase 1895-2018).
WV increase has been measured and reported by NASA/RSS since 1989. Extrapolated back to 1960, the increase 1960-2002 was 7%. Further extrapolation indicates that it was about 10% lower in 1700 than 2002. WV trend 2002-2014 was flat but the aberration of el Nino action since then is still sorting out. Assessment of the sources of water vapor indicates about 86% from irrigation, 11% from cooling towers and 3% from everything else.
Multiple compelling evidence shows that CO2, in spite of being a ghg, does not contribute significantly to warming. Apparently the increased absorption by surface molecules is compensated by increased emission from CO2 molecules above the troposphere.
Increased WV has contributed to warming but is self-limiting.
Hello William Hausa. That’s very good, I wish that I had written that.
Michael.
MJE VK5ELL
Funny, I thought the inequality was driven by carbon offset trading.
“Sorry, we cannot allow you to start a ceramics factory, Al Gore has sold your entire country’s carbon budget to General Motors”.
Economic inequality is a very bad thing. Some people are rich, some are poor. Very unfair. Everybody should be poor.
What warming? It’s been cooling for the last three years. That ought to make things more equal for the developing nations. It’s all good.
“This problem is created somewhere else,” Abdur Rouf Talukder, Bangladesh’s Finance Secretary, told TIME earlier this month. “We are spending more on adaptation because we have to live.”
“The effect is more dramatic elsewhere, particularly in sub-Saharan African countries including Sudan, Burkina Faso and Niger, where climate change has driven GDP per capita more than 20% lower that it would have been absent climate change.”
___________________________________________________
Africa’s real problems:
https://www.google.com/search?client=ms-android-samsung&ei=dcq_XMmlMdvBmwWrrYTIBg&q=who+Africa+malaria+children+mortality&oq=who+Africa+malaria+children+mortality&gs_l=mobile-gws-wiz-serp.
OTOH:
http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/africa-population/
___________________________________________________
What has utterly destroyed the most impoverished nations in the world is a lack of free-market capitalism…
If one looks at the economic freedom index rankings by country, the poorest countries have the least economic freedom, and are run into the ground by terribly corrupt Socialist/Theocrat/Kleptocrat tyrants who severely restrict economic development and create high-risk economies where foreign investment is restricted:
https://www.heritage.org/index/ranking
The most impoverished countries in the world cannot not improve their GDP growth by slapping solar panels on mud huts…
The ONLY way these impoverished countries can achieve sustainable GDP growth is by adopting free-market capitalism, which would naturally lead to economies run on cheap, efficient and abundant fossil fuels.
One just has to look at the situation in Zimbabwe where the country went from being prosperous and ‘the breadbasket of Africa’ to supposed equality and dire poverty.
I met a couple running a business in New Zealand who had a safari business in Zimbabwe, but got closed down.
They decided not to relocate elsewhere in Africa as they said that they didn’t want to go through the same experience in twenty years time.
Good governance is the prime need for sustained development.
Venezuela is achieving “equality” as we speak.
The claim that very small changes in average temperatures can be extracted from all the rest of the much more important influences on economic growth is obviously absurd. As various books have recently described, cities that straddle a border (e.g. Mexico and the US) can be hugely “unequal” despite sharing every geographic, geological, climatic etc etc characteristic.
Once again we see that provided you show that climate change is bad, you can get utter rubbish published and publicised.
Experience has shown that every country that embraces higher energy costs shows lower economic growth over time. Green energy so far has always been more expensive than conventional sources. Economic growth comes from greater efficiency, not less. Replace the ox with a tractor, waterwheel with a motor, a person can produce more for the same level of effort. This paper is a great example of choosing a conclusion and modelling your way to it. Real data say otherwise.
Back in the stone age, the “global equality” index was very high. As technology improved, the inequality index increased drastically. Now, relatively few people own factories, land for farms, etc., but they USE that wealth to produce cheap I-phones, computers, HDTVs, cars, etc. that the rest of us can buy relatively cheaply.
That private sector concentrated wealth makes EVERYBODY richer.
well stated. If you could wave a magic wand and spread all the world’s wealth evenly to every person on the planet and then allowed the people the freedom to do with their portion of that wealth what they wish, within a generation you’d once again have a large and growing inequality gap because some people will use their resources to better themselves and innovate ideas to make the lives of themselves and others better while other people will just fritter away their resources doing nothing productive with them.
You can see it today in every work place across the country. Take any group of workers doing the roughly same work for the same pay. Some of those workers live paycheck to paycheck while others save a small portion of their pay for a “rainy day” and others still invest a good chunk of their pay for future gain. Same starting place (paychecks of equal size) with vastly different outcomes in regards to the wealth they’ll accumulated over a lifetime of work: The paycheck to paycheck guy will likely never reach a point where he can comfortably retire (because he has nothing saved and thus needs to keep working) whereas the guy that invested heavily in his working years gets the option to retire early and comfortably should he so choose.
It would take far less than a generation. Hustlers, theives, brigand and politicians would be busily sucking up as much of that spread out wealth as humanly possible. And that would be damned quick.
I was being generous. Plus I was referring to the gap when it is an undefined “large”. Obviously the gap would start almost immediately for all the reasons you state, but it would take some time to reach the “large” stage (depending on the definition of large).
As my uncle Joseph, a mud Marine who slogged his a$$ across the Pacific, up and down the Korean Peninsula and then all across the Central Highlands and Laos, said, “Never underestimate the potential of unrestrained human stupidity”. And he HATED government. Almost as much as he hated the Japanese till his dying day. Taking all wealth and “redistributing” it would be the largest example of unrestrained human stupidity ever witnessed.
Which is precisely why leftists, and islamists, target it. People are far easier to control when they are in deep poverty.
“global warming has put a drag on improvement.”
More likely the lack of investment by the world bank in it’s refusal to invest in anything that the green blob don’t like has cost more in lives and improvements in living conditions in the developing countries than any change in the climate.
James Bull