Published on September 18, 2024
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During a recent event organized by Vivek Ramaswamy At the Cato Institute, protesters interrupted his presentation by taking the stage and chanting “climate fraud,” among other similar allegations. But it’s not just unknown activists who are accusing Ramaswamy of climate lies.
Last year, Ramaswamy said:
“In reality, more people are dying because of bad climate change policies than because of actual climate change.”
THE fact-checkers of New York Times have called this claim “false.” But the fallacious justification for this conclusion reveals a worrying ignorance of the profound security benefits of using fossil fuels, and thus of the very heart of the debate over the economics of climate change.
In their fact-checking post on social media, they acknowledge their ignorance by writing:
“It is difficult to know what Ramaswamy was referring to when he said that people were dying because of bad climate change policies.”
But then, in the corresponding article, fact-checking reporter Linda Qiu mentions a key trend she found on Ramaswamy’s X account.
She writes:
“During his appearances in the campaign and on https://twitter.com/VivekGRamaswamy/status/1688684396201529350Mr Ramaswamy also highlighted the decline in disaster-related deaths over the past century, even as emissions have increased.
Indeed, as the chart at the top of this article shows, the annual number of deaths from natural disasters has fallen from 1.27 million in 1900 (the earliest year for which there are reliable global estimates) to just 86,500 in 2023. This figure includes all climate-related events: droughts, wildfires, storms, earthquakes, volcanic activity, and floods. This huge downward trend is all the more astonishing given that it has occurred as the global human population has exploded, from about 1.55 billion in 1900 to over 8 billion in 2023.
Qiu attempts to downplay the significance of humanity’s increasing climate security by attributing the improvement to factors such as technological progress:
“According to experts, This is due in large part to technological advances in weather forecasting and communications, mitigation tools and building codes. The World Meteorological Organization’s May study, for example, found that 90 percent of deaths from extreme weather occur in developing countries, precisely because of the technological gap. Disasters are becoming more frequent, even as the death toll declines, the organization says.
But it is only if one ignores the economic benefits of fossil fuel use over technological progress that Mr. Ramaswamy’s argument seems to be refuted. In fact, the use of fossil fuels, from before 1900 to today, has had a massive impact on humanity’s ability to power the economy and advance technologically, particularly in developing countries where populations rely heavily on fossil fuels to meet their basic needs. Last year, 82% of global energy production came from fossil fuel consumption.
Samantha Gross, director of the Energy Security and Climate Initiative at the Brookings Institution, explains:
“Today’s world is unrecognizable compared to that of the early 19th century.e century, before fossil fuels were widely used[…] Human health and well-being have improved dramatically, and the world’s population has grown from one billion in 1800 to nearly eight billion today. The fossil fuel-based energy system is the lifeblood of the modern economy.”
The intermittent nature of less reliable energy sources such as wind and solar means that even in the rare cases where they are price competitive with fossil fuels, they are not a substitute but an augmentation of fossil fuel-dependent power grids, as climate journalist Shannon Osaka explains in Washington Post :
“Even in regions where much of the electricity is generated from renewables, fossil fuels are often used to provide reliable power that can be used at any time of day or night. Without this power, power grids would experience widespread outages. Within weeks, shortages of oil – still the primary fuel for road transportation and shipping goods around the world – would hamper deliveries of food and other essentials.”
The article by fact-checking of New York Times is right to note that technological advances are largely responsible for improving humanity’s security from climate danger, but he fails to mention that fossil fuels are a crucial resource for affordably powering these technological advances, whether it’s powering basic research labs or the trucks that deliver food and medical supplies to where they’re needed most. In explaining the central role of technological advances in protecting humanity from climate disaster, Qiu also unwittingly explains the central role of fossil fuels.
Despite the important role that fossil fuels play in the global economy, many countries have taken steps to restrict their development, citing concerns about climate change.
During the 2019 election campaign, Joe Biden said:
“I want you to look into my eyes. I guarantee it. I guarantee it. We are going to end fossil fuels.”
He hasn’t quite ended them as he promised, but he has stifled them in a big way, from canceling the Keystone XL pipeline expansion by revoking the necessary permit, to halting new oil and gas drilling and leasing permits in the United States in 2021 and again in 2022, to raising oil royalty rates from 12.5% to 18.75% and reducing lease sales on federal lands, to taking countless other steps to reduce fossil fuel development.
A similar trend can be seen in Europe, which has reduced its electricity production from fossil fuels by 19% by 2023 alone, according to the World Economic Forum.
These policies are generally consistent with United Nations goals, which include “net zero targets; energy transition plans with commitments to no longer produce coal, oil and gas; and plans to phase out fossil fuels,” according to their 2023 Climate Ambition Summit.
But how do these policies cause deaths?
These widespread government-imposed restrictions on the exploitation of fossil fuels reduce supply and therefore increase the cost of energy across the global market.
As a result, many communities in developing countries and elsewhere struggle to afford the infrastructure, supplies, expertise, research and development, and other resources they need to prepare for climate disasters. Artificially high energy costs are likely causing untold death and destruction on the fringes of the global economy, where even small increases in energy prices can mean the difference between a hospital having electricity to power its equipment, a convoy of trucks having enough fuel to reach an emergency site, or an agricultural sector having running water for its irrigation systems, and so on.
The use of fossil fuels, and indeed almost all material transformations of the environment that have economic value, represent a trade-off between human ingenuity that makes the world more hospitable and environmental changes that have unintended and sometimes dangerous consequences. Fossil fuels are extremely useful in providing affordable and reliable energy, but they also have the negative side effect of causing undesirable environmental changes.
Given the centrality and irreplaceability of fossil fuel use in much of the modern economy – which has facilitated a level of technological development that has enabled man to be moreshelter of climate change, not being more threatened by it – Vivek Ramaswamy’s claim that “more people are dying from bad climate change policies than from actual climate change” is entirely plausible.
By calling this claim unequivocally “false” simply because they found it “difficult to say what Ramaswamy was referring to,” the fact-checkers from the New York Times have offered their unsubstantiated opinion, rather than any real fact-checking, on the relative lethality of climate change versus climate change policies. And their opinion suggests a strange way of thinking (or rather, not thinking) about the crucial role that fossil fuels have played in creating resilience against the dangers of climate change.
Original article published in the Foundation for Economic Education.
