RUTHFULLY YOURS

More than $1 trillion is spent every year to fight a climate crisis that doesn’t exist. That’s a load of money squandered without saving a single actual life. There’s a far better use for those dollars, if saving lives is the goal, one that’s much cheaper and easier to implement, and would make an enormous difference right away. Sadly, it requires mass purchases of a modest appliance the climate zealots have been trying to kill.

According to the Climate Policy Initiative, climate finance reached an all-time high in 2021, with $1.3 trillion poured into the bottomless green hole. Yet to this group and others, that’s just not enough.

Mark Gongloff, a Bloomberg opinion columnist, says it’s a no-brainer to spend $266 trillion by 2050 “to limit and adapt to climate change.” The alternative to this splurge “is $2.3 quadrillion in accumulated damage by the end of the century.”

That, of course, is a projection, and is likely as far off the mark as the apocalyptic global warming predictions we’ve heard for more than 50 years that no one ever apologizes for making.

Far more practical than a wild spending spree is the proposal of Bjorn Lomborg, president and founder of the Copenhagen Consensus. His is a “second generation of thinking on global warming.”

“Rather than starting with the most radical procedures, Lomborg argues that we should first focus our resources on more immediate concerns, such as fighting malaria and HIV/AIDS and assuring and maintaining a safe, fresh water supply – which can be addressed at a fraction of the cost and save millions of lives within our lifetime.”

To that we add that millions of lives would be saved from the simple act of ensuring that the 3.5 billion people who languish in hot climates have air conditioning.

“Between 2000 and 2019, an average of 83,000 western Europeans lost their lives every year as a result of extreme heat, compared with 20,000 North Americans,” the Financial Times reported this month.

According to the International Energy Agency, “Lack of access to indoor cooling puts much of the global population at high risk for heat stress, adversely affecting thermal comfort, labor productivity, and human health.”

In the U.S., “we combat extreme heat by blasting the AC – a luxury many Europeans lacked,” say our friends at the Committee to Unleash Prosperity.

Comparing death rates between U.S. and European cities during the hot months reveals an inequity that looks more like a gap between developed and undeveloped nations.

For instance, when temperatures exceed 86 degrees in Atlanta, the relative risk of death rises by less than 25%, but in Athens, Greece, it jumps by more than 100%. In Portland, the increase is again less than 25%, but in London, the death risk spikes by nearly 150%. A chart compiled by the Financial Times shows similar disparities between several other cities.

After indoor temperatures top about 75 degrees, “humans start to suffer,” says the Financial Times. “Sleep duration and quality fall rapidly when” it’s too warm inside, while “cognitive performance fares similarly.” U.S. high school test scores fall on hot days, which has “a lasting impact on” students’ “prospects of graduation,” while office workers’ productivity “rapidly deteriorates as the mercury rises.”

“And that’s all before we get on to mortality, where death rates climb steeply once temperatures hit” the 86 degree mark.

A medium-room air conditioner can be bought at Home Depot for less than $300. Using that figure, how much would it cost to equip every home that has no air conditioner with a unit? Figuring an average of five people per household, a low number for some of the hottest nations on Earth, gives us 700 million homes for the 3.5 billion who need an air conditioner. If every one of those households was given a $300 unit, the cost would be $210 billion.

That’s another large sum of money – but it’s less than the “$369 billion in funding for clean energy and electric vehicle tax breaks, domestic manufacturing of batteries and solar panels, and pollution reduction,” that was in Joe Biden’s crony-bankrolling Inflation Reduction Act, and far less than the $1.3 trillion in annual climate spending previously referenced.

The nearly innumerable non-governmental organizations and tax-exempt green groups that have raked in untold billions in taxpayer-financed grift to “save” the climate should use their unearned riches to buy air conditioners for the world’s poor.

They won’t. Instead, they fight air conditioning because, like automobiles, it consumes energy, which is an absolute obscenity it the eyes of the global warming zealots. Their belief system is despicable.