No Free Lunch. You Can't Fight Climate Change Without Taking a Big Hit.
Modern governments try to defray costs as long as they can. Where possible, they prefer to make them the next government's problem. They're already neck deep in red ink.
It's hard to reform a fossil fuel economy because of the sunk costs. You might have paid a ton of money for that Hummer but it won't be much of a down payment on that new Tesla. Maybe you'll stick with the Hummer for a few more years.
Think of the fight against climate catastrophe as discovering you have dry rot in the transom of your boat. It's not going to be a cheap fix but it's cheaper than losing your entire investment. It's going to cost a lot of money to fight climate change but that's a small fraction of the cost of inaction.
There are a lot of numbers being thrown around but most of them focus on the costs of decarbonizing, slashing our greenhouse gas emissions, mitigation.
Mitigation is climate action for the planet. But there's also adaptation, climate action for your own country. Adaptation aims to make your country more resilient to climate impacts. It's about keeping the trains running on time, upgrading the electrical grid, that sort of thing - infrastructure.
Whether mitigation or adaptation, coming up with the money is a political question and, in today's hyperpartisan politics, that makes it a political football.
Joe Biden is pursuing a pared-down budget of $1.9 trillion for climate change and other social programmes. That's not going down well with the Republicans and a couple of Democrat holdouts. Penny wise and pound foolish.
By zeroing in on those numbers, the public debate seems to have skipped over the economic ramifications of climate change, which promise to be historically disruptive — and enormously expensive. What we don’t spend now will cost us much more later.The bills for natural disasters and droughts and power outages are already pouring in. Within a few decades, the total bill will be astronomical, as energy debts surge, global migration swells and industrial upheaval follows. The scale of the threat demands a new way of thinking about spending. Past budgets can no longer guide how governments spend money in the future.
Some economists and climate scientists have calculated that climate change could cost the United States the equivalent of nearly 4% of its gross domestic product a year by 2100. Four percent is likely a conservative estimate; it leaves out consequential costs like damages from drought and climate migration. It assumes the United States and other nations eventually move away from energy generated by oil, coal and natural gas, though not as immediately as many say is needed. In this scenario, the planet will still warm by around 3 degrees Celsius by the end of the century from preindustrial levels, a change that would be disastrous.
I have come to the conclusion that we have devolved, both societally and as a species, to the point we are now incapable of addressing this crisis, Mound. In your comment on Owen's blog, you quoted JFK about dong the hard things. It seems that in this new century, we prefer illusion to reality, sweet lies instead of bitter truths.
ReplyDeleteIf we can't rise to this, Lorne, we may be done. Our knowledge base has never been higher. Yet we are devolving.
DeleteCarl Sagan summed it up in his final book, The Demon Haunted World. "...pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us - then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls."