OPINION:
The United Nations recently made an astonishing revelation. Its new report on climate change concedes that, after squandering $9 trillion since 2020 to lower temperatures, the organization has failed miserably.
It now tells us that “exceedance of 1.5°C [above pre-industrial levels] is now widely assessed as unavoidable.”
So what happened to all that money? Where is the audit of one of the largest wastes of tax dollars in human history? A lot of people got rich off this scam. They should be in jail for this swindle.
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The story gets even worse. Instead of begging our forgiveness for its failure, the United Nations now says that its miserable track record at reducing global warming should not be interpreted as justification for reduced ambition.
This reminds me of Milton Friedman’s observation about government programs: Whenever they fail to deliver, they ask for more money.
Yet what is astounding is how much money the United Nations wants.
Let us grab our calculator and add it all up. According to the United Nations, citing the Climate Policy Initiative, the world needs $7.8 trillion annually, on average, through 2030 — or $39 trillion over five years. After that, it wants $9 trillion annually, for a total of $45 trillion over five years. Next, it asks for another $144 trillion over 15 years, averaging $9.6 trillion per year.
By this columnist’s calculation, that is a 10-year total of $84 trillion and a 25-year ask of $228 trillion.
I am not making this up.
To put that price tag in perspective, just the next five years of this global warming spending will cost roughly five times as much money as World War II, the New Deal, the Interstate Highway System, World War I, the Apollo program, the B-29 program, the Manhattan Project and the Transcontinental Railroad — combined.
Yet even if we spend that money, we are told, the temperatures will continue to rise.
Would it not be smarter and cheaper to just install air conditioning in every household in the world? That may seem cavalier, but as a reminder, the United Nations discourages reliance on air conditioning, arguing it contributes to climate change.
These people would be against electricity if we did not already have it.
Cheer up, though, the end is not nigh. Doom-and-gloom environmental predictions have been wrong over the past century. A survey of environmental predictions found that nearly every prediction since the 1970s of an apocalypse by 2025 — including the coming of another ice age — has proved false.
Sure, sometimes a batter who bats .000 hits a home run — but hardly ever. It would not be very smart to bet the farm on people who have been so wrong time and time again.
• Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at the America First Policy Institute and a co-founder of Unleash Prosperity.
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