What an expensive mistake! US$10,000 per year per person to get to net-zero carbon — because of an error in the climate models. By Bjorn Lomberg, who accepts the government climate scientist’s story about the cause of global warming but illustrates the ineptness and cost of their solutions to the perceived problem.

The disconnect between the global elite and the real world is growing by the day. …

If you’re a wealthy, climate-concerned jetsetter with private health insurance and a recession-safe job, you don’t need to worry about malaria, recession, waiting in line for cancer tests or your children falling behind when schools close again. Nor are these the issues that will get you attention or airtime.

Solving the real world’s big problems is messy, and progress is slow and unspectacular. It is far more exhilarating to make grand promises to save the entire world by going net zero or abandoning synthetic fertilisers. …

Solving many of these problems is not rocket science. The rich should stop making food more expensive by insisting on organics. They should stop making energy more expensive by dictating intermittent renewables. Instead, we should increase R&D into better seeds to deliver more food with a lower environmental footprint.

We should drive green energy breakthroughs that could make drastic CO2 reductions cheap and feasible. And we should include the many other urgent crises that have simple and effective solutions — for instance for tuberculosis and for securing much better learning in schools across the world with computer-assisted teaching at the right level.

Unfortunately, the elite instead seems to double down on climate and environment, and The Netherlands and Sri Lanka are then just warnings of what will come. Net zero will be the costliest policy the world has ever embarked on. The price tag just for paying for renewable assets and infrastructure alone will be more than $US5 trillion every year for the next three decades, according to McKinsey. This equates to more than one-third of the global tax intake.

For the US alone, one study shows that getting 80 per cent of the way to President Joe Biden’s climate promises by mid-century would cost each American more than $US5000 every year. Going all the way would likely more than double that cost.

I could tell the world how they were fooled by an error in the climate models, but no one wants to hear. With a PR team and some funding we could change history.

Cooling started in 2016, about as I predicted, because it is mostly (though not entirely) controlled by space weather.

hat-tip Stephen Neil