Children against climate change

Thousands of children around the world are demonstrating in favor of climate action. Encouraged by young Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, they want to convince adults to "panic". But this world wave so energetic should be reoriented to do more for humanity and the planet. The current political solutions to climate change, for which Thunberg wants more money and attention, are incredibly inefficient and costly.

The Paris agreement will help little. Even if all promises are kept, the world will not reach 1.5 ° C by 2030. A recent badysis shows that out of nearly 200 signatories, only 17 are honoring their commitments, mainly because they have very little promised. However, this insignificant achievement will be the most expensive policy in history, as it will cost $ 1.2 trillion in growth losses each year up to 2030.

Climate strikes in schools would make more sense if we had solved all the other problems. But this year, 5.4 million children will die before the age of five. a quarter of a billion out-of-school children; Nearly one billion people are dying of hunger and more than two billion people are lacking water and sanitation.

Despite the enthusiasm aroused by the Thunberg campaign among the editors of the liberal newspapers of Europe and the United States, climate change is the last priority for the world's poorest. The UN asked about ten million people what was most important to them. They talked about health, education, employment and nutrition, and ranked climate among 16 out of 16 priorities.

Politicians who deny the existence of climate change do not tell the truth. But those who say that "the end of the world" will come in 10 years do not do it either: they are just scary.

According to UN scientists, if we do absolutely nothing to combat climate change, its impact will be equivalent to a reduction in our income of 0.2 to 2% in the 2070s, in the next five decades. Do not forget that by 2070, personal income will have increased by 300 to 500%.

Children must also challenge the alarmist headlines and insist that the information comes from the largest climate study of the UN.

They keep telling us that climate change is causing more and more extreme weather events, such as hurricanes. But UN climate scientists have not "observed significant trends" in the frequency of hurricanes in the world in the last century. In the United States, the trend of hurricanes that affect the land has been decreasing since 1900, like hurricanes. harmful, an important study in Nature shows that the damage caused by hurricanes around the world costs about 0.04% of global GDP. Even baduming that warming makes hurricanes far more damaging by 2100, increasing prosperity and resilience means that the cost will be halved to 0.02 percent of GDP. Since 1990, the overall costs of all climate-related disasters have decreased relative to GDP.

Schoolchildren in difficulty should ask decision makers to make less broken promises like those in Paris and insist on effective policies How to invest much more in research and development to ensure that the price of green energy falls below fossil fuels. Young protesters would be surprised to learn that such policies are backed by Bill Gates and Barack Obama.

Children rightly point out that they will live in the world left by adults today. That's why strikers are forced to attract the attention of adults by using silly rhetoric to promote incredibly costly and ineffective solutions, instead of emphasizing smarter solutions. And they should do twice as much effort in their studies to be part of the generation that will find vaccines against malaria, fight hunger, fight cancer and also innovate in green energy for make it so cheap that it will eventually undermine the energies of climate change forever.

*Director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center and author of the best seller The skeptical ecologist and Cool It.