Climate Change Is Not Causing Inflation
climate change inflation
A recent study in the journal Nature: Communications Earth and Environment claims climate change is contributing to price inflation. The study’s authors say they found climate change harms economic productivity and food production, leading to higher prices. They examined more than 27,000 monthly consumer price index data points around the globe.
I can’t begin to describe all the ways this claim is not just outright false but is misleading in a manner clearly intended to motivate restrictions on fossil fuel production and use, policies which would in fact increase energy prices, harm food production, and result in lost jobs, higher prices, and lower incomes. Policymakers taking this study seriously might impose policies which themselves would result in worse inflation than the world is currently experiencing, which is in part due to existing climate policies.
An article by the editorial board of the journal Issues & Insights, “Have We Reached Peak Climate Nuttery?” captures the foolish nature of this claim well. To be fair, I can’t say that linking climate change to inflation is the nuttiest purported connection I’ve seen made by some scientists and the media. After all, at one time or another some have asserted climate change is contributing to divorce, mental illness, hyperactivity, childhood attention deficit disorder, rising crime, rising drug use, “cultural erosion,” and the increased likelihood of space satellite collisions, among myriad other purported harms, all of which are completely unconnected to climate change except in the twisted minds of these researchers and media outlets.
Still, linking climate change to inflation is patently idiotic. First and foremost, in the immortal words of Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon, in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.” As I told Issues & Insights when they reached out to me for a comment on the ludicrous attempt to link climate change to inflation, climate change doesn’t print money, nor does it create new programs or increase government spending which injects money into the economy when productivity is not increasing and thus diminishes the ability of private companies to gain access to capital for productive uses not sanctioned or subsidized by government.
https://heartlanddailynews.com/2024/04/climate-change-weekly-502-climate-change-is-not-causing-inflation/
