Energy policy is a battle between climate catastrophe and climate resilience. And one side is roundly defeating the other.
The exact definition of “climate resilience” is debated, but it typically includes adaptation to changing climate conditions, absorption of climate impact, and transformation of the environment using technological or scientific means. All of these resilience strategies are made possible by economic progress, including fossil fuel-led growth. With less access to abundant and reliable energy, civilization’s climate resilience would be substantially reduced.
The widespread availability of fossil fuels directly contributes trillions of dollars to the global economy each year, and indirectly contributes incalculably more by making countless other industries possible. This economic growth is continuously granting more and more communities access to better infrastructure, medicine, education, and other precious advantages against the dangers of an ever-changing environment. Fossil fuels, by allowing civilization to cheaply and reliably power its homes, vehicles, hospitals, factories, and other engines of human wellbeing, protect people from an ever-widening range of potential climate impacts.
The climate resilience side of the equation, despite being at least as significant as the climate danger side, is often ignored in the models of future climate impact. This is because, while it is difficult to model a changing climate, it is impossible to model the future of human ingenuity, which will be composed of decisions and insights that only the people of the future can possibly know.
So which edge of the climate sword is sharper? Has the damage caused by climate change so far outweighed humanity’s progress building climate resilience?
According to research from the University of Oxford economist Max Roser and the University of Edinburgh geoscientist Hannah Ritchie, absolute global deaths from natural disasters have been going down almost every year between 1901 and 2018, even while the global population has exploded from roughly 1.6 billion to roughly 7.7 billion during that period.
This overall reduction in deaths by natural disaster, which accounts for floods, extreme weather, extreme temperature, earthquakes, and droughts, is similar to the consistent reduction in deaths by disease in recent decades (COVID-19 obviously overturned these disease data in 2020, but not in a way that’s directly relevant to climate change, since it is only vector-borne diseases that are directly exacerbated by climate change).
The data—which show climate-related deaths have been falling even while fossil fuel use has intensified climate change—suggest that so far climate danger has been no match for climate resilience in the battle over human wellbeing.
The IEA, the Biden Administration, and others advocating for extreme near-term reductions in global fossil fuel use have one seldom-examined assumption at the foundation of their climate alarmism. This assumption is that despite climate resilience having consistently outpaced climate danger in the past, soon the tables will turn and climate danger will gain the upper hand.
It is widely believed that dangerous tipping points likely dwell in the future of environmental change. What is rarely factored in is that continued economic growth, facilitated in large part by fossil fuels, will likely continue to produce unpredictable technological and scientific breakthroughs, creating new forms of security and wellbeing, and at new scales.
The climate alarmists would have society sacrifice one of its most precious industries, and thus radically increase the price of electricity, food, housing, and countless other critical assets without which the global poor would be at the mercy of starvation and homelessness. These economic changes might sound weatherable to those of us who can afford frequent meals out and subscriptions to Netflix, Disney+, and HBO Max all at the same time, but to the global poor, this is a matter of life and death.