The Montreal Solution

There has been an ethically lacking attempt by the usual suspects, Lomborg, Pielke, the Breakthrough folk and now Matt Ridley to claim that coal is necessary for the developing world to prosper and we will all be so rich in the future that doing nothing now about climate change does not matter.  It is interesting that those who care not a fig for the poor spend so much time arguing for their right to burn coal, but, quite obviously this is merely a ruse to allow some world class greenie bashing.

It is a mistake to allow this to go unchallenged and indeed it is easy to show how threadbare it is.  Even Twitter has enough characters to call it out.

First, climate change underway today mostly hurts the poor. It is clear that any assessment shows that the countries that are going to be most hurt by climate change are the poorest countries. Every attempt at an integrated assessment model, the IPCC reports and more shows this.  By opposing immediate action on climate change Lomborg, Pileke and Ridley are hurting the poorest.

Second, fossil fuel as an energy source is characterized by relatively low capital costs and high operational costs. Wind, solar, hydro and nuclear the reverse. If fools like Lomborg and Ridley really wanted to help the poors they would be advocating for donation by the developed world to carry those initial capital costs and increased energy efficiency so the poors were not subject to eternal thralldom under the coal and oil industry.

Third, a point made by Stephan Gardiner that the claims about the sweet bye and bye are merely pious hopes that larger economy will allow future generations to deal with an exacerbated climate problem.  If climate change limits economic growth, there is no larger economy, and even if there is a larger economy, it may not be enough to deal with the chaos associated with climate disruption. The Dark Ages in Europe were not nearly as pleasant as Roman times.

But Eli is a generous bunny so consider, if you will, their argument that coal is necessary for development and it would be unethical to oppose development of the poorest nations. Well, if this were 1800 perhaps, but let us concede it just to be nice. The Montreal Protocols under which freons were phased out provide a fine solution, the developed world goes first, drops coal like a hot rock right now and the underdeveloped and developing world follow on at a later time.

Now some, not Eli to be sure, might suspect that the tears being whined for the poor developing countries not being able to use coal are a beard but that would not be nice, would it.

As to the costs of coal, consider China which is moving as fast as it can away from coal because of the half MILLION deaths each year from air pollution and here are some picture postcards .