Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
Editorials & Other Articles
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
Climate Change Could Cut the Economy in Half. We're Not Ready for It.
Later this century, sometime toward my teenage son’s late middle age, climate change might torch 50 percent of the world’s gross domestic product. I’ll say that again. Sometime around 2070–2090, climate change could be doing so much damage to ecological and human systems, and the links between them, that the global economy could contract by half. (For comparison: The U.S. economy shrank by roughly 30 percent in the Great Depression.)
This projection may sound exaggerated to the point of being implausible. Yes, two entire regions of Los Angeles burned to the ground last week. Yes, preliminary estimates of the cost of this one disaster range from $40 to $250 billion. But U.S. GDP is roughly $27 trillion; global GDP $107 trillion. Wouldn’t the U.S. and world economies be orders of magnitude more gigantic by 2070? Surely climate change couldn’t wipe out all that wealth?
This projection may sound exaggerated to the point of being implausible. Yes, two entire regions of Los Angeles burned to the ground last week. Yes, preliminary estimates of the cost of this one disaster range from $40 to $250 billion. But U.S. GDP is roughly $27 trillion; global GDP $107 trillion. Wouldn’t the U.S. and world economies be orders of magnitude more gigantic by 2070? Surely climate change couldn’t wipe out all that wealth?
Even understanding the credentials behind the study, many people will still find this figure implausible. Why is that? Humanity is entering a climate regime that has no precedent in our species’ history. The last time there was this much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the oceans were so much higher that the eastern coastline of what would become North America ended about one hundred miles west of where it is currently. The Arctic, now largely a frozen wasteland, was a lush pinewood populated by giant camels. And our economy is adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere faster than any other phenomenon in geological history has ever done. It is absurd to imagine that severely damaging the climate would not severely damage the economy, which relies on a stable climate, even in the coming decades.
Our economy looks impervious to climate change because economics, finance, and governments deliberately separate or “decouple” our ecology and the economy in their calculations: The value of what is known as “nature” and the costs of its destruction are not included in the prices we pay for things. What happens to the climate system—to everything the economy cordons off as “nature” or “natural resources”—is considered “externalities.”
https://newrepublic.com/article/190566/climate-change-cut-50-percent-gdp-growth
Good article but once again here is a writer vastly underestimating the time frame! The damage is happening now and societal and habitable systems will be destroyed way before your time frame of 2070-2090!
5 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
