#136 Global Warming is Good

The Christian Economist looks at “The other hand” of global warming, and finds some good effects.

 

The Inflation reduction plan signed by President Biden recently will reduce inflation by…..wait for it….are you ready?  I’m an academic, so I’ll use three citations: First, The Congressional Budget Office says the effect will be “negligible at best,” second, the Bipartisan Policy Center predicts “small impacts one way or the other.”  Third, and finally, the Penn Wharton Budget Model says the effect on inflation will be “statistically indistinguishable from zero.”

So the inflation reduction plan might INCREASE inflation?!  George Orwell’s 1984 predictions have arrived in 2022, in the form of “Newspeak.”  Newspeak is the fictional language of Oceania, a totalitarian super state that is the setting of the 1949 dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four by Mr. Orwell.

The Inflation Reduction Plan contains $430 billion in one legislative bill.  That bill would be the 36th largest country in the world.  Larger than the GDP of South Africa, Singapore, the Philippines, and Vietnam.  The only COMPANY with a larger revenue is Wal-Mart at $560 billion.  Think about it: That ONE spending bill is greater than the revenue of every other company in the world.  Amazon’s annual revenue is only $386 billion, Apple takes in $275 billion.  And Toyota, the world’s largest automaker, has annual revenue of $256 billion.  

Of that $430 billion, 90% of the spending is on green energy programs for the expressed purpose of slowing global warming.

OK, here’s the strength of economic thinking.  I often stand in front of my class and proclaim: There are no...