NGFS Central Banks Adopted Exaggerated GDP Climate Damages Report says Friends of Science Society

Climate policy analyst Roger Pielke, Jr. reports that the Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS) central banks adopted an exaggerated climate damage report that claimed huge future damage to the economy, says Friends of Science Society. A new report by Robert Lyman debunks Pembina Institute's claims about Canada's oil and gas sector and exposes the frail 'clean economy' sector.

CALGARY, AB, Aug. 21, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- In an Aug. 15, 2025, article titled, "Too Big to Fail," by climate policy analyst Roger Pielke, Jr., he reports that a deeply flawed 2024 economic paper that projected huge economic losses due to climate change, was adopted by the Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS) central banks for their new "damage function," says Friends of Science Society. The article in question is "The Economic Commitment of Climate Change," by Kotz et al. (KLW24) and was published in the high-impact, prestigious journal, Nature. Though other scholars quickly noted flaws in the analysis, NGFS still adopted this paper as the basis of their "damage function."

The implications are discussed in this article in the Western Standard of Aug. 19, 2025, "Banks and financial institutions now use this for projecting future costs of climate change, thus skewing how society sets policy to respond to climate change."

Pielke, Jr. also points out that the KLW24 paper also employed the implausible scenario known as Representative Concentration Pathways 8.5 (RCP 8.5). This scenario, widely used in the banking community, has been misdefined for years as the "business-as-usual" case, when it is not. RCP 8.5 is the source of the claim of a "climate emergency." Pielke, Jr. and his colleague Justin Ritchie continue to expose how the misuse of the RCP scenarios have distorted public policy and perceptions of climate risk. 

Friends of Science Society has issued a number of open letters to the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Services and the Canadian Securities Administrators, alerting them to the implausible distortions of "climate risk" analysis if based on RCP 8.5, and the impossibility of reaching Net Zero.

The province of Alberta is a major oil and gas producer, and the sector was hit hard by job losses and loss of investment during the 2014 downturn in global energy prices. A new report by Pembina Institute titled "Drilling Down; Oil and Gas Jobs in Transition," claims that reduced employment trends in the oil and gas industry over the last decade were indicative of future trends. The report urges policy changes and legislation to enhance additions to employment in the clean energy sector, claiming that in future, this will cause Canada to prosper.

Retired energy economist, former federal public servant and diplomat, Robert Lyman, debunks such notions in a new Friends of Science Society report titled "The Energy Sector That Enriches Canada and the One That Does Not." Lyman writes that the Pembina Institute report is "misleading in almost every way." In an article of six years ago, Lyman wrote that the clean energy sector was about 3% of Canada's GDP, and is still only 3% of Canada's GDP today, even after many billions of dollars have been spent by governments promoting it." Most of the beneficiaries of renewables jobs are in China. 

In that 2019 article "Renewables Jobs – For Other Countries," Lyman quoted former Prime Minister Stephen Harper as saying, "For the most part, that is the Chinese-American economic relationship. The Chinese sell, the Americans buy, and the jobs move one way – to China." This is the trend that the Trump Administration is reversing.

In contrast to the Pembina Institute claims, Lyman reports that Alberta's oil and gas sector continues to provide billions of dollars in revenues and thousands of direct, indirect, and induced jobs. Friends of Science Society produced this short overview video of the report highlights titled, "Drilling Down…Deeper."

For those interested in the impact of Net Zero ideology on farming and food prices, Friends of Science Society invites you to join them in-person or via live stream for Dr. Joseph Fournier's presentation on Sept. 25, 2025, in Calgary. Fournier is a well-respected Alberta scientist and prolific author, as well as being a rancher himself. More details on the Friends of Science website.

About
Friends of Science Society is an independent group of earth, atmospheric and solar scientists, engineers, and citizens that is celebrating its 23rd year of offering climate science insights. After a thorough review of a broad spectrum of literature on climate change, Friends of Science Society has concluded that the sun is the main driver of climate change, not carbon dioxide (CO2).

SOURCE Friends of Science Society