Understanding the Costs of Climate Change
The good news is that the world has begun to use analytics to quantify the damage that is occurring due to climate change. Here’s a report noted in Bloomberg News that sets the cost at $1.2 trillion annually, or about 1.6% of the world’s GDP. Further good news, depending on how you look at this, is that the cost of ameliorating this issue, though steep, is confrontable, if we take it on now.
The bad news is that the world is a million miles away from international agreements that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It’s as if we’re all living in one of those dreams where we can see the train coming, but we can’t get off the tracks.
Sadly, it´s not a dream. I feel this has nothing to do with politics, it´s with politicians and their interests. Just delay the solution a little more. The next one in line will have to deal with it, they are too busy trying to keep their jobs.
The solution lies in everybody´s hands, we have to educate and create a conscience in everybody and start to work on the problem as if evangelizing, one to one, send out missionaries in pairs. We all hoped to see some reaction from politicians, but, as always, are left waiting. Let´s not get to the end of our lives and repent.
I would posit that climate disruption is rapidly accruing more costs to humanity than all the holistic economists in the world can quantify in several lifetimes. However, this is no longer about “future generations” alone, it’s also about our parents’ children.
The stand-alone barriers of political will that have been carefully erected and reinforced between rational solutions and their practical application have their genesis and nourishment in the politics of greed, which is neither wholly red nor blue, but instead a toxic hue of sickly green and gold.
As long as cash remains king in our society, making pocketed sock-puppets of our leadership long before they take office, we will suffer beneath the most vicious avarice and craven cowardice imaginable.
Steven is quite correct that we cannot wait for our pocketed leadership, and that we must proceed in our own lives to make each other aware and move together toward change.
However, government – as ideally envisioned – is the only institution suited by design to function as the protection and enforcement arm of We the People and to protect and defend the Public Commons.
If We the People are ever to fulfill our ancestors’ promise to themselves and to us – to “form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity” – we must reclaim and reform our government toward those purposes.
There is only one rational first step – against which all the might of greed is more and more heavily assembled – and that step is to stop the bribery. Without that primary success, no others are open to us.
Truth – Non-Violence – Cooperation – Direct Action – Perseverance
Craig,
I know that this is not your fault – it’s shoddy reporting on Bloomberg.
But I despise it when someone quotes “a report”, no reference, no link. Essentially we’re in Rush Limbaugh territory here – “somebody said THIS, so here it is…” I think if 1.2 trillion is the number, that would be a tremendously USEFUL number, as you could then just state that: “climate change is currently costing the world $40/ton of CO2e that is emitted, and therefore it is unquestionably worth at least $40/t-CO2e to mitigate further climate change… So we should offer a subsidy to wind, solar, and geothermal generation of $40/MWh if there is still coal power on the grid, and $20/MWh if there is only gas generation on the grid…
It would be easy, as that is more than enough of a subsidy to start a new surge in wind build-out.
But I’m sure that number is easily contestable. While I think the final accommodation costs for global warming WILL BE worth an ammortized ~$20-$50/t-CO2e over the next century (after factoring in a 5% annual discount rate). The global warming damage/accommodation cost for the U.S. this year is probably around 20 billion dollars. It’s hard to imagine how the rest of the world could have added up to 50 times that number.
On reflection, it could be as much as 30 billion dollars for the U.S. if the harvest this year is as bad as I expect… But that’s still going to be very difficult for the rest of the world to stack up to 1.2 trillion.