UN Paris climate deal ‘is likely to be history’s most expensive treaty’ – ‘Cost of between $1 trillion and $2 trillion annually’

http://www.wsj.com/articles/about-those-non-disappearing-pacific-islands-1476400840?mod=djemMER
Bjorn Lomborg:

Even more insidiously, doom-mongering makes us panic and seize upon the wrong responses to global warming. At a cost of between $1 trillion and $2 trillion annually, the Paris climate agreement, recently ratified by China, is likely to be history’s most expensive treaty. It will slow the world’s economic growth to force a shift to inefficient green energy sources.

This will achieve almost nothing. My peer-reviewed research, published last November in the journal Global Policy, shows that even if every nation were to fulfill all their carbon-cutting promises by 2030 and stick to them all the way through the century—at a cost of more than $100 trillion in lost GDP—global temperature rise would be reduced by a tiny 0.3°F (0.17°C).

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Tackling issues like poverty, health care, corruption and domestic violence would do even more. Those who seek to help should keep the bigger picture in mind.

Mr. Lomborg, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, is the author of “The Skeptical Environmentalist” (Cambridge Press, 2001) and “Cool It” ( Knopf, 2007)

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