Happy New Year 2020
Happy New Year everyone! I wish you and your families all the best for the coming year. May you all be healthy and wise and may all your wishes come true.
I thought I should start the year with some positive news because something tells me that I will have enough opportunities to get angry at things later in the year anyway.
So I want to go back to a post I wrote late last year that showed that even in the United States, the majority of people think that the government is doing too little to address climate change. What is more, a majority of people in the US give priority to environmental protection over economic growth. This may sound surprising given the rhetoric of politicians in Washington, but an independent study by the Pew Research Center has confirmed these findings.
Two out of three Americans in that survey said the government is doing too little to fight climate change. Even amongst Republicans, a majority of moderate Republicans and a majority of Millennial Republicans think so.
The main concern for Republicans about environmental regulation is that they fear it might be bad for the economy. Overall, seven out of ten Americans think that policies aimed at reducing climate change are good for the economy or make no difference, but amongst conservative Republicans, two out of three fear that fighting climate change is bad for the economy.
Source: Pew Research Center.
In fact, fighting climate change is good for the economy. A recent paper by Matthew Kahn and his colleagues has investigated the expected economic impact of climate change by 2030 and 2050. They looked at both business as usual scenario as well as a scenario, where countries work to achieve the Paris climate goals. Below is the expected impact on GDP/capita for a selection of countries around the world. The thing to notice is that for every country, a future where we achieve the Paris climate goals has a higher GDP/capita than a future in the business as usual case. In other words, fighting climate change is good for business.
Estimated impact of climate change on GDP/capita
Source: Kahn et al. (2019).
Intuitively, Americans, independent of their political leaning, understand this. Asked if the US should invest in renewable energy sources like solar panels and wind farms a large majority of Americans are in favour. Even amongst conservative Republicans more are in favour of investing in solar and wind than in expanding coal mining and fracking. This is amazing and shows how out of touch politicians in Washington are with the views of the public in this matter – or how beholden to lobbying interests from the fossil fuel industry.
Source: Pew Research Center.
But renewable energy is big business in the US by now and creates many jobs. In 2018, a total of 855,000 people were employed in renewable energy projects and industries while only 50,000 were employed in the coal industry. The solar energy industry in the US alone employed 225,000 people and the wind energy industry another 115,000.
Say what you will, but economically, it would be cheaper if we shut down every coal mine in the US, spend thousands of dollars in retraining the coal miners and guarantee them a job in the renewable energy industry, than to continue with the current policies. The only ones who would be worse off if we shut down the coal mines and gave every miner a new job would be the billionaire owners of the mines. But then again, every policy has unintended consequences.