Goodmorning everybody.

Today I will be speaking about climate change. Specifically, whether it is a crisis, or simply a
problem among many, and how we can fix it. I will provide a more optimistic take on climate change,
and hope to persuade you that, while still a problem, it is far from the doomsday narrative portrayed by
the media.

Climate change refers to long-term shifts in temperatures and weather patterns. These shifts
may be natural, such as warming after the ice-age, or human generated, primarily due to the burning of
fossil fuels.

Since the industrial revolution, we have seen a spike in greenhouse gas emissions, and
consequently a rise in global temperature. That is why the main driver of global warming seems to be
human emissions, but some argue that it could be equally attributed to natural causes.

Global warming has advantages and disadvantages. Advantages include milder climates in colder
regions, and less illness and deaths caused by colds. Disadvantages include more deaths, diseases,
injuries, and loss of property caused by extreme weather events, and by fluctuating temperature.

Climate change is definitely a problem, and the disadvantages outweigh the advantages.
However, the apocalypse is not looming on us, and this idea creates paralysing panic which leads to false
judgment. The overall effect of climate change to the economy by 2100 is a less than 4.0% hit to GDP,
and the UN estimates that by the end of the century, the average person will be 450% richer than today.
This means that due to the 4% hit, the average person will instead be 434% as rich. The Scandinavian
political scientist and environmental economist, Bjorn Lomborg, stated that climate change is a problem,
but far from a catastrophe.

Humanity faces many problems, and global warming is among them. The media’s
dramatisation of climate change draws attention away from more important problems. Millions are
dying in poor countries of malaria, tuberculosis, and malnutrition, however we continue to focus mainly
on climate change. The most important emergency remains lifting people out of abject poverty, and to
do this, we have to supply developing countries with cost-effective and reliable energy sources,
something for which renewables are not ready for. We mustn’t blurry our judgment, and distort our
priorities with the false idea that climate change will be the end of the world.

Nevertheless, climate change is a problem, and we need to solve it. In the pre-industrial era, we
got almost all our energy from renewables, and currently only a small portion of our energy comes from
renewables because they are not yet ready to meet our ever-growing needs. In an attempt to fix global
warming, we try to force renewables through taxes and subsidies. Unfortunately we aren’t fixing it, and
CO2 emissions continue to rise. Since 1995 there have been 27 COP meetings for climate change that
have failed to produce significant results. Taxes and subsidies raise prices, which means poor people
struggle and some die. Heating prices are rising, and so about 1 million elderly struggle to keep warm in
the winter. People believe that subsidies will only be needed for a short time to incentivise people, but
the estimates show that they will only increase. Subsidies can also only be given reliably by rich
countries. Taxes and subsidies are generally ineffective, but with carefull placement, they can be
beneficial. A carbon tax (5 dollars a ton), for example is economically efficient, but it will not solve the
problem. Global warming will not be fixed by telling people to stop using their cars, or to stop eating
meat. The solution is not in telling people ‘NO.’

There is much more effective solution to global warming than taxes and subsidies. Innovation.
When horses were flooding London and New York with their manure, the solution was not to tax horses,
or to subsidise walking. The solution was the innovation of the car. And when the car was producing lots
of air pollution, the solution was again an innovation, the catalytic converter. Fundamentally what is
needed to solve climate change, is to drop the price of renewables below the price of fossil fuels, so that
everyone buys it, including large carbon emitters like India and China. To do this, we should dramatically
increase investment in green innovation. A group of Nobel laureates found that for every dollar invested
on current policies (subsidies to wind and solar, for example) we would avoid 3 cents of climate damage,
but for every dollar invested in innovation we would avoid 11 dollars of climate damage. That is why
innovation is the key to solving global warming.

To conclude, climate change is a problem, but not a catastrophe. To fix it, we should avoid the
doomsday narrative, and encourage politicians to invest in innovation and research for green energy.

Thank you.