White House report lets truth slip out: Economic impact of climate change is negligible

Report reveals that global temperature changes barely impact economic growth.

Climate change has become the excuse for almost everything. Every weather event is blamed on climate change. Hot temperatures, cold temperatures, rain, drought, wildfires, rioting in the streets, and you name it, are supposedly proof of climate change. My recent favorite is that hot temperatures in Texas during the summer are proof of climate change. (I was born and raised in Texas and have decades of experiencing Texas summers that have always had plenty of days over 100 degrees). According to the United Nations’ “Causes and Effects of Climate Change,” storms, rain, drought, floods, loss of species, insufficient food, more health risks, and poverty are all due to climate change.

Climate change has become a political cudgel to justify every radical and unrestrained government spending program enacted in the last two years, especially the comically misnamed Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). It and many other bills and regulations were justified as necessary to deal with the impacts of climate change. The IRA was initially called the Build Back Better Bill, even well into the Congressional debates, when suddenly the name changed to the Inflation Reduction Act. Insiders decided that “Build Back Better” sounded too Soviet, and since they are all about propaganda, it seemed appropriate to name it the opposite of what it does.

Surprisingly, a report issued by the President’s Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued a report on May 13, 2023, that said climate change has had a minimal impact on U.S. gross domestic product in the past and will have a negligible effect on the future.

The report from the OMB and CEA saying that climate change does not significantly impact the U.S. economy went unnoticed until Steven Koonin highlighted it in a recent WSJ opinion article. Koonin is a Ph.D. physicist who has researched global environmental science for years and authored a best-selling book titled “Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters.” In his book, Koonin dispels popular myths and unveils little-known truths, such as, despite a dramatic rise in greenhouse gas emissions, global temperatures decreased from 1940 to 1970. He also shows that the models used to predict the future cannot accurately describe the climate of the past, suggesting they are deeply flawed. I highly recommend Koonin’s book.

In his recent WSJ article, Koonin points out that the report by the CEA and OMB says that the warming of 2.2 degrees the earth has had since 1950 reduced GDP by less than 0.5%., which, he noted:

… is trivial, considering real GDP has grown by more than 800% since 1950.

If warming reaches 4.5 degrees—about what the United Nations’s climate panel projects for 2100 under plausible scenarios for future global emissions—the consensus reduction amounts to less than 2% (of GDP).

In other words, if the average annual GDP growth rate is 1.5% for the next 80 years, the economy would grow 232%. A 2% climate climate-change effect would reduce that growth to 225%. As physicists say, that’s a difference “in the noise.”

This is an amazing revelation. White House economic experts say climate change will have virtually no impact on economic growth, then what is the justification for totally remaking the U.S. economy and replacing hundreds of years of infrastructure? There isn’t one. The facts do not back up the policies.

This may be the most significant revelation in the history of revelations because all of the justifications behind recent federal spending bills, including the Inflation Reduction Act and all other energy policies of the Department of Energy, and other agencies, vanished with that statement. Every approach promoted as a necessary response to climate change was based on a lie.

The report from the President’s economic advisors was not just an idea they whipped up out of thin air. Their conclusion that GDP has been insignificantly impacted by global warming was based on 12 independent peer-reviewed estimates of how America’s gross domestic product would decline as the global temperature rises. Anyone interested should read the 12 peer-reviewed studies the CEA used in their report, page 4.

So why are Executive Branch advisors being ignored? It is because the radical climate change element has taken over all components of the U.S. government, and they are driven by ideology, not facts.

Interestingly, the CEA/OMB report is dated May 13, 2023, but went unnoticed until Koonin wrote about it in the WSJ. One reason is that the report is a typical white paper that is difficult to read because it is a hard-core economic analysis full of financial jargon, tables, and graphs that are typical of the work product of Ph.D. economists. Another possible reason is that the report’s conclusions were inconsistent with White House policies, so the report was filed away in hopes that it wouldn’t be discovered. Unfortunately for them and fortunately for Americans, Steven Koonin found and exposed it.

A later section of the CEA/OMB report reinforces how little future greenhouse-gas emissions are expected to affect the U.S. economy in the coming decades. As Koonin noted:

It (the White House report) projects that today’s “debt-to-GDP ratio” will rise to 111.2% at midcentury if the world is on a path to achieve net-zero emissions by 2075, while it would rise to 112.6% under an equally unlikely high-emissions scenario. There is little doubt that many factors other than climate—such as technology and trade—will be far more consequential for the economy and debt over the next 25 years. The 1.4% difference between these two extreme scenarios is, again, in the noise.

The bottom line is that two agencies within the Executive Office of the President, the Council of Economic Advisers and the Office of Management and Budget, the top agencies responsible for the economic policies of the President of the United States, provided excellent analyses and powerful arguments why federal policy should NOT be focused on climate change. They make a compelling case that the economic effects of climate change are so minor as to be unimportant. Yet, the Office of the President and other agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, have pushed policies that are based on the presumption of climate change.

The key legislation that the President and Congress pushed through, the Inflation Reduction Act, completely contradicts this report. Congress needs to be asking why.

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