According to Greta Thunberg we only have 12 years or, in the worst case scenario, just 18 months, to save the world. Are we really so close to the apocalypse? Is there any truth in what Greta keeps saying? The answer to both these questions is “no”. Greta is not the first person talking about our forthcoming end and will surely not be the last one. Then, why is she so successful among both common people and scientists? It is quite easy to explain her success on the public opinion: the medias are always looking for sensational news and engaging headlines and the youngsters — the population’s bracket more interested to Greta’s claims — are easily impressionable, especially about issues regarding their future (who, at 16, doesn’t want to save the world to provide himself a better future?). A bit more challenging is the explanation of the academic support to Greta, which is probably due to two main factors. First, who studies the climate change — especially if he considers mankind as its main factor — is aware that we need to change our habits. Second, academics usually perceive themselves as an “enlightened technocracy” who should impose the “right” decisions on the population.

However, the worst part in this situation is that — after the umpteenth #ClimateStrike joined by millions of people around the world — who doesn’t agree with Greta and doesn’t fall for the millenarian fever of her followers is considered ignorant, denier, when not accomplice in the destruction of the planet. This new “truth”, imposed by a small minority of intolerant people (“minority rule”), will have effects on everyone’s lives. According to the environmentalists, this is surely an excellent outcome, but is a huge problem for everyone else: the policies suggested by Greta, and promulgated by politicians around the world, will have many consequences, more or less visible, which will imply a deterioration of our living conditions.
We all care, or should care, about the environment, the quality of life in our cities, our well-being and the planet’s one. But that’s not the point. The problem is the maximalism of Greta’s movement, the recourse to catastrophism, the threatening, apocalyptic and millenarian tones, which are not supported by any scientific evidence, but risk to push the governments into adopting expensive — for country’s economies and taxpayers — policies, which are scarcely effective for the environment, in the face on an unreal threat. The anthropic origin of the global warming and climate changes is still more an act of faith, than a scientific truth. We don’t have a model able to forecast the temperature’s trend, yet: how can we think, than, that we could be able to develop an intervention to reverse it?

This emergency logic also provide the justification for a massive redistributive operation, through which convey the citizens’ approval. For example, in Germany, where the Green party is strong and the economy, without the nuclear energy, relies on coal and natural gas, the government is proposing a 100 billion euros’ plan, but Green New Deals are being promoting and promulgating almost everywhere around the Western world. More taxes on the consumers and the not-green producers (or more debt, which only means more taxes in the future) in order to collect resources to be allocated in “green” investment, or behaviors. The most ambitious politicians talk about a top-down de-carbonization, as well as an industrial and productive programmed reconversion. What could go wrong? Everything, as the Soviet five-year plans showed us, during the last century. The road to hell has always been paved with good intentions. But, as the 18th century French economist Frédéric Bastiat warned his contemporaries, every human action has two effects: “what is seen and what is unseen”. The intentional implementation of top-down “green” approaches will easily lead to dangerous unintended consequences (this phenomenon is known as “heterogeneity of ends”).

Catastrophism has, unfortunately, this unpleasant side effect: it can lead us to sacrifice development and economic growth to defend the environment, with tragic results: give up the formers, without being able to safeguard the latter. There is much talk about sustainable development, but what we desperately need is a sustainable environmentalism, compatible with the development, because without the latter there is no technologic innovation, which is the only way to actually reduce pollution and save the environment.

Indeed, it is now necessary to find a tradeoff between caring for the environment and the more important survival of our species: for the first time in human history, half the earth’s population is middle class or wealthier and the rate of deaths from natural disasters is well below what it was even a few decades ago. Protecting all that is just as important as protecting the environment. And we can do it only by stopping to believe to whom, regularly and periodically, scream about the forthcoming apocalypse. The problem here, anyway, is not the 16-years old Greta, but who is using her, and her particular condition, for his electoral — or fundraising — advantage. This phenomenon is not new and has a specific name: pedophrasty, which — according to the highly reputable Urban Dictionary — is “an argument involving children to prop up a rationalization and make the opponent look like an asshole, as people are defenseless and suspend all skepticism in front of suffering children: nobody has the heart to question the authenticity or source of the reporting”. The only result achieved so far by who is exploiting Greta is the nervous breakdown of a whole generation of kids and teenagers (including Greta) afraid that they’re all going to die in a few years.

One of the key demands of these shameful people is that everyone respects the science, and unites behind it. Unfortunately, the manifesto for the climate strike movement isn’t just unscientific, but actively anti-science — and hugely dangerous as a result. The message is clear: the best way to save the planet is to “facilitate and support non-market approaches to climate action” and support “environmentally sound, socially acceptable, gender responsive and equitable climate technologies”. This manifesto would make things worse. Because it is not asking “What is the most cost-effective way to prevent or protect against climate change?” It is instead telling us that market mechanisms have no place at all in fighting climate change. The ideas behind the climate strike movement are fundamentally illiberal. They are fundamentally misguided. This climate propaganda is actually doing a huge disservice to those who are serious about managing and mitigating environmental risks. If we’re going to save the planet, we do need to unite behind the science. But that includes the science of economics.
Now, economically speaking, global warming is a classic example of what happens in an open-access commons. The atmosphere is unowned, so no one has an incentive to protect and conserve it. Instead, people overexploit and pollute it. Governments initially implemented regulations to cut back on noxious air pollutants, but eventually market mechanisms were adopted. As a result, air pollutants have collectively declined while the economies grew. Scientists call this the environmental Kuznets curve: environmental commons tend to deteriorate as countries begin to develop economically — but once per-capita income reaches a certain level, the public starts to demand a cleanup. It’s a U-shaped pattern: economic growth initially hurts the environment, but after a point it makes things cleaner. By then, slowing or stopping economic growth will delay environmental improvement, including efforts to mitigate the problem of man-made global warming.

This leads us to another important point, which is not being considered by environmentalists. The main polluters of the world are not Western people and companies, but Chinese and Indians. They live in developing countries and still need to reach the point where economic growth starts making things cleaner. The best way to let them do that is to not set regulations that would slow their economic growth. There is something else to say about developing countries and especially about China. Chinese people and companies have embraced capitalism and are now active actors of the globalization process, which dramatically improved their economic situation, taking them out of poverty. But China as a country is still a communist regime: this means that the main economic decisions are taken by the Communist party. Among these decisions, there is the choice of which source of energy to use (and let me tell you, it’s coal) and of which technological innovations to study. As in every other top-down approach, the outcome is not the best possible and, probably, it might be the worst one, as Aral Sea’s draining by the Soviet Union (another communist country where all economic decisions were taken by the rulers) perfectly show us: it used to be the fourth largest lake in the world, then the USSR diverted its two major contributing rivers for crop irrigation, and now all its surrounding ecosystems are totally dried up and destroyed. It’s enough to develop a rule of thumb: “the more economic decisions are taken centrally by bureaucrats, the less environmental-friendly the outcomes are”.

For some reasons, anyway, the state is often assumed to be nature’s default, benevolent caretaker. Government agencies are free from the short-sighted profit motive, we are told, and can steward land for the long term. If only this were true. In fact, in a myriad of ways, governments are among the worst polluters in the world, and even the agencies of the state specifically devoted to environmental stewardship have themselves helped cause environmental disasters. Why is the government such a terrible steward of the environment? Why not? When a government agency fails, it is declared to be “underfunded” and the outcry is for the agency in question to be trusted with more money and responsibility, not less. It’s hard to see why governments would have any incentive to change the status quo. Can someone explain, for example, why the production of nuclear energy — the cleanest and most efficient available, so far — is banned by a wide majority of governments worldwide?

Which is, then, the reason why common people believe in government intervention to preserve the environment, while not realizing the improvements come from outside the government and, most of the time, despite the government? The main reason why people don’t recognize the efficiency of market mechanisms is that almost everyone thinks that free market and capitalism are synonym of consumerism, which leads to more pollution. But this is incredibly wrong: consumerism is the very opposite of capitalism. Consumerism is again a product of government interventions as expansive monetary policies: our governments are telling us that we must spend — otherwise our economies will collapse — and keep providing us with easy money to do so. The more we spend, the more we buy, the more we use, the more we waste, the more we pollute: it’s a vicious circle implemented not by individuals and companies, who just try to provide products and services to who need them, in the most efficient way possible, but by bureaucrats and politicians only interested in seeing increasing GDP and inflation values, as a result of their decisions. Speaking of what, the battle for who wants to fight for the future generations shouldn’t be against global warming, but against an exponentially more dangerous threat: public debt.

To conclude, we need a sustainable environmentalism because ignorance and fear can kill more than emissions. The climate propagandists keep telling us that climate change depends only on the amount of carbon dioxide: a thesis not supported by scientists. CO2 is not even a bad thing: it is, actually, one of the reasons why there is life on Earth. It feeds plants, which then produce the oxygen that we breathe. It’s a greenhouse gas and as such holds part of the solar radiation which the Earth reflex and transforms it in heat, providing the perfect habitat for life. It is said, anyway, that nowadays there is too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, because of our actions, and this might increase the planet’s temperature by 1 or 2 degrees in the next decades. The problem with this prediction is that is not considered as one of the many possible outcomes, but as the only possible one: for some reasons, the environmentalists believe that scientists have discovered how to make perfect and certain forecasts about the future. If this was true, we would have solved every problem affecting our lives. Unfortunately, it is not. There is no need to worry, anyway, since mankind has experienced much higher average temperature, in its 10,000-years history. Together with the rest of nature, the mankind was always able to adapt to these climate changes, despite the lack of today’s technological innovations. Actually, in periods of heat, civilization grew faster than usual.

The solutions proposed by millenarian environmentalists are not going to make the world a better place: it’s 30 years that the Western countries are trying to reduce CO2 emissions, without success. The truth is that they only decrease when economies collapse, so the only way to cut them by half (as these environmentalists are asking) would be having the worst economic recession ever, but this eventuality would be a worse catastrophe than global warming and, in order to cut greenhouse emissions, also the developing countries should give up their economies, going to back to poverty and high mortality rates. There is only one way to preserve the environment without dying by starvation and famines: technological innovations, which are achievable only through a continuous economic growth and the development of poorer economies. We are not going to die in a few years: the only real threat we are facing now is ignorance.