What If We Burned It All?
In 2024, the journal Nature published a blockbuster paper from the Potsdam Institute titled The economic commitment of climate change. The headline claim was simple and scary.
Even if emissions stopped rising tomorrow, past warming has already “committed” the world to an income reduction of about 19% by 2050, which they translated to roughly $38 TRILLION in damages.
Follow-up coverage highlighted even more dramatic long-range numbers. By 2100, unchecked climate change was said to be able to slash global GDP by about 62%. Financial institutions, central banks, and regulators rushed to cite the paper as proof that climate change is not just an environmental issue but an extinction-level event for capitalism itself.
Fast forward to this week. After independent researchers dug into the data, the authors have now retracted the original paper.
A single outlier dataset from Uzbekistan’s GDP records in the early 1990s was allowed to dominate the statistics. When that outlier is handled correctly, the projected long-term GDP loss drops from about 62% to around 23% … roughly a factor of three smaller for that time horizon and still grossly overstated in my opinion.
Nature pulled the original study. The Potsdam team insists that their “core message” still holds, and they are already circulating a new version that again claims large climate damages, just with slightly smaller numbers.
This is not just an academic embarrassment. Numbers like these feed directly into the social cost of carbon, the dollar value that agencies attach to each extra ton of CO₂. That single number is then used to justify everything from power plant rules to automobile standards to massive green spending programs.
The Biden administration has been pushing the social cost of carbon up toward $200 per ton using a mix of climate economics models and judgment calls about “catastrophic risk”. Studies that scream “tens of trillions in damages” give political cover for those choices, even when the math behind them later falls apart. Below is a statement issued by the Biden EPA on December 8, 2023…
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) updated its estimate of the “social cost” of carbon dioxide—a contrived way of increasing the cost of everything made from or using hydrocarbon resources to vilify those projects and keep them from becoming economic. The new estimate nearly quadruples the estimated cost of carbon dioxide to the world that the Biden administration is currently using — a change that will result in stronger climate rules and more stringent regulations that will increase costs for consumers as the least expensive materials will now cost more when projects are being considered and their costs estimated.
If this sounds familiar, it should. In a recent piece I called “The 7 Trillion Lie,” I walked through how the International Monetary Fund magically inflates fossil fuel “subsidies” to $7 trillion per year by counting uncharged imaginary carbon taxes as if they were cash payments to oil companies. These numbers show up in speeches, reports, and talking points and then get used to justify vast green spending that has very little to do with real pollution.
In other words, the economic foundation for climate emergency politics is a stack of model-based extrapolations piled on top of each other. When one of the flagship bricks gets yanked out by a retraction, I think it is fair to ask some uncomfortable questions.
A thought experiment you will not see in official reports
Forget “net zero by 2050” and elaborate tax models. Imagine instead that humanity did the opposite of what climate activists demand.
What if we burned every last bit of fossil fuel we could get our hands on?
Climate campaigners claim that such a world would be uninhabitable… yet the geologic record shows long intervals with CO₂ at or above one thousand where life flourished… and even an ice age during the Ordovician and Silurian, when estimated CO₂ was far higher than today. I explored those contradictions in detail in my earlier piece “Does CO₂ drive global surface temperatures?”
In other words… even if we imagine the extreme scenario that terrifies the United Nations and the climate industrial complex… the planet stubbornly refuses to behave like a simple one knob thermostat.
source irrationalfear.substack.com