One of the most important lessons my university law tutors drilled into me was the importance of not trusting text books (or any other second hand source of information) and the need always to check the original source(s). When learning law, those original sources were the law reports themselves, plus statutes and stautory instruments (and EU legislation during the time that the UK was a member of that institution). Habitually I now always look for a link to the original study or report, when I read a headline and article in a newspaper or on a website, purporting to summarise a study or report. Often, having gone to the source, I have found that the headline isn’t remotely justified.
And so, when I read an article in the Guardian last week headed “Tackling climate crisis will increase economic growth, OECD research finds” (with, for good measure, a sub-heading Third of global GDP could be lost this century if climate crisis runs unchecked, says report”) I immediately looked for a link to the report. However, I looked in vain. This was disappointing, because the claims in the Guardian article were remarkable, albeit what we have come to expect from that organisation. Basically, we sceptics are barking up the wrong tree, because “green” (i.e. low/non-”carbon”) investments are an unmitigated good.
They won’t damage the country’s finances, and will instead increase our economic growth.
Setting ambitious greenhouse gas reduction targets (and putting in place the policies to achieve those targets) will result in a net gain by the end of the next decade [my emphasis – er, hang on, that’s fifteen years away]. A net gain of 0.23% [wow!] will be even bigger by 2050 if it “includes the benefit of avoiding the devastation that not cutting emissions would wreak on the economy.” That last strikes me as a questionable claim, to say the least, and so I determined to search the internet to find the source of these claims, namely the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), in a joint report with the UN Development Programme.
Eventually I tracked down what amounts to little more than a press release on the OECD website. This tells us that the Guardian article is of dubious merit, to say the least – not least because there is no report. Instead we learn:
As nations prepare their next round of climate commitments with their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) [those are the ones that should already have been submitted by now, but which have largely been ignored], the OECD and UNDP have joined forces under an initiative to demonstrate that investing in robust climate action fosters better growth for all.
The initiative, carried out with support from the German Federal Foreign Office, will produce a report [my emphasis] for release in May 2025 entitled “Investing in Climate for Growth and Development: The Case for Enhanced NDCs”, which aims to help countries design and implement NDCs that attract investment and place people at the heart of climate action.
In other words, the Guardian article plays fast and loose. It turns a press release about a “report” that hasn’t even been written yet, but which when it does appear will clearly be unadulterated propaganda, into a hard story making positive claims based on nothing of substance at all. The reality is that the UN (and with it the OECD) is concerned that NDCs aren’t appearing as fast as they should, that momentum is slipping (rapidly now that Trump is in the White House) and the whole climate change project is in danger of collapse. And so they have decided on a project (with a bit of publicity – the Guardian is happy to oblige) to try to get things moving again:
Climate action is losing momentum, while accelerating it is needed to secure prosperity. Mounting economic uncertainty, geopolitical tensions and rising public debts are shifting priorities and straining government budgets, particularly for climate. While new and more ambitious climate plans, known as Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), were due by February 2025, only 19 countries had submitted updated NDCs by that date. Any slowdown in climate action risks delaying much-needed investments, weakening economic resilience and increasing climate damages. The cost of insufficient action is clear: it could threaten future development, economic stability and long-term prosperity.
Infuriatingly, trying to track down some real analysis with a view to assessing its worth (or otherwise) simply locks one into a doom loop. At the foot of the OECD press release there is a link with the words “Read the initial key messages presented at the Petersberg Climate Dialogue on 25 March 2025”. Click on it, and it takes you here. This amounts to nothing more than another OECD publication, running to four pages (certainly not a study or report with detailed analysis in support of its claims, in other words), with the heading “Investing in Climate for Growth and Development: THE CASE FOR ENHANCED NDCs”. When you make it to the end (it doesn’t take long – it is only four pages, after all) you find another link with the words “For more information, please visit: [link]”. Keen for more information (after all, I haven’t really found any yet) I clicked on the link, only to find that it returned me to the OECD press release where I started.
The story, then, is what I believe is known as a nothingburger. But this sort of thing works, especially given the compliant mainstream media and the usual suspects who are keen to give it still more publicity. When I searched for the report, before I even found it, simply by using some key words from the title, I found loads of examples of the story plastered all over the internet. The Make Polluters Pay website has gleefully picked up on the story with an article under the headline “Tackling climate crisis will increase economic growth”. It’s not actually an article, rather it’s three paragraphs with a link to the Guardian article (after all, there isn’t really anything else to link to, is there?). The ECIU put out a tweet (do they still call them that?):
Tackling climate crisis will increase economic growth, OECD research finds. Setting ambitious targets on cutting greenhouse gas emissions, and setting out the policies to achieve them, would result in a net gain to global GDP by the end of the next decade, whereas a third of global GDP could be lost this century if climate crisis runs unchecked.
Naturally, it links to the Guardian article. The Good Law Project (which also links to the Guardian article) similarly tweeted:
“Tackling climate crisis will increase economic growth, OECD research finds”. Any country that tries to save money by ignoring the climate crisis is going to find itself deep in the hole when the climate crisis becomes unignorable. Britain can lead – and it must”.
I particularly liked the Good Law Project tweet because it’s so nonsensical. It implies that by spending money on the “climate crisis” we can dig ourselves out of that particular hole, regardless of what the rest of the world does, but if we don’t spend money on it (whatever the rest of the world does) then we’ll be in big trouble.
Even Giovanni Ghirga, Paediatrician, Scientific Committee Member of ISDE Italy (International Society of Doctors for the Environment), wrote a letter to the BMJ which appears on its website offering a rapid response to an earlier BMJ publication “Equitable energy transitions for a healthy future: combating air pollution and climate change”. His letter says (inter alia):
In this regard, a recent joint report by the OECD and UNDP provides critical data that should be integrated into this conversation (1). According to the report, investing in an ambitious climate transition is not a net cost to the global economy but a path toward sustainable growth. A decisive reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, supported by robust policy frameworks, is projected to generate a net global GDP gain of 0.23% by 2040. In stark contrast, inaction on the climate crisis could result in a loss of up to one-third of global GDP by the end of the century—a scenario tantamount to systemic economic collapse.
Needless to say, his footnote 1 is a reference to Fiona Harvey’s article in the Guardian.
I could go on, but you get the gist. Not for the first time I find myself musing on the quote attributed to Mark Twain: “A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”
