Is there a paper on that? 40 trillion sounds like a lot and I’m curious how that number is generated.
To put that number in context, which is just an order of magnitude, it's $5,000 for every person on Earth, about 1.5x the current US national debt, and just under the combined market cap of NYSE+NASDAQ.
As an existential problem for humanity that doesn't currently have a solution, I think that's a decent cost estimate.
Aka do you live below sea level, raise the city, or move somewhere else. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago
The global food surplus is projected to continue even in the worst case. Energy and raw material production is similarly not a major concern. People continue to live in Dubai which demonstrate how extreme local conditions can get without forcing exodus. Further, few places are expected to get even that bad.
Yes, changes to weather patterns, sea levels, invasive species, even diseases are likely. But, collapse of civilization is only really a risk if WWIII kicks off.
Water availability is a concern for farming and industry, but not really people. Desalination is cheap enough for personal use even in India. Every 10 gallons a day is an extra ~4$ per year. Projecting US use age on global poor is unaffordable, but the global poor don’t use nearly that much water.
Last mass migration caused by ISIS. COVID caused reduced oil consumption is enough to make a trouble for oil exporters. Global warming is worse - drought, flood, fires. World is extremely fragile, resources supplied from another part of the world, even today cobalt mining is horrible, what would be then? I've heard of another civilization and broken supply chains [2].
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions#cumulative-co2-emis...
[2] 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed (Eric Cline, PhD) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRcu-ysocX4
I also think that you are assigning agency to the general public in ways that are unlikely to hold up. Clearly groups could whip up hatred over global warming, but they can do that over just about anything. The root cause is almost never as important as the people guiding things and the goals being pushed.
As to [1] what’s interesting to me is the US emissions are currently about 1/2 of China’s and dropping fairly quickly while China’s are still expanding rapidly. Dropping US emissions will continue to help, but it’s currently less important than slowing how fast China’s increase. And thus someone aims the mob at a slightly different target.
But coral can’t adapt to warmer more acidic waters overnight. Polar bears can’t darken their fur in a couple generations to hunt in perpetual summer tundra.
Air conditioning does not protect workers that need to work outdoors, or people that live in areas with limited access to electricity.
And this says nothing of the other effects we still have no way of combating, including forest fires, stronger hurricanes, prolonged droughts, increased pesting of climate tolerant species, mass migration of climate refugees from the worst affected areas, and—eventually—conflicts and even wars arising from this mass migration. There is no technology that can save us from these effects.
Yes the effects of the natural world is indeed devastating. But there is no way the society as we know it can survive these changes. At best I see humanity regressing to another imperial age with constant wars around the planet, massive exploitation of the majority of the human kind, technology only serving to increase this exploitation, frequent famines, no relief after natural disasters (except for the wealthy few). And even this can’t last forever as at some point the mass of humanity will not bear it any longer and we can expect a societal collapse at a scale not seen since the Bronze age collapse of the 12th century BC.
The world is awash in excess capacity.
In fact these worries—and the fact that we are calling for drastic changes to prevent this disaster—is in fact counter to any Malthusian theory. A true Malthusian would state this collapse is inevitable. We state they are certain if we allow the climate disaster to progress unhindered.
Agriculture can go a long way with animals, wood, and stone. Extracting energy from wind and rivers is easily attainable from that basis. At which point we would have serious energy to work with. Hydro electric dams provide 6.1% of the total U.S. electricity. That is plenty of energy to kick start industrial manufacturing and get to wide spread solar power.
The next civilization may be extracting most of it’s materials from our cities, but that’s an advantage if anything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_cloud_brightening#Costs
IE. Canetoads.
Going after a single unproven solution (yes this includes non-existing types of nuclear energy too) is just magic at this point and it doesn’t work.
It didn’t. And since I’ve learned that new technology doesn’t save us when there is an underlying social issue that is causing it. With GMO the issue is food distribution. In the climate disaster the cause is a little more complex but undeniably a few actors are making an unfair amount of money while polluting the climate for the rest of us.
I find more hope in solutions like carbon tax, international agreements, greener infrastructure, and general climate justice, then for an unproven magical technology that will be deployed on top of the existing social problems.
Never underestimate the tendency of the rich to shift the cost to others while keeping the profit. New nuclear is not going to change that.
Advancements in technology (including GMO crops) and productivity in general have massively raised standards of living in the developing world.
Raised standards of living are what permit people to give a crap about things like oppressed people in the next village over and climate change. Reducing the cost of commodities, like energy and grain, by any means raises standards of living, especially at the margins, and is what permits more people to care about abstract things.
* I really doubt GMO has raised the standard of living for the average person.
* I really doubt people in less then stable economy have any less salt towards the rich, the government, or polluters.
* I really doubt there is a correlation between the standard of living caring about your neighbors.
So to answer your question. No. I have never noticed that countries where people are pissed at the rich are the people that live in stable economy. To prove you wrong, take a look at Greta Thunberg’s twitter feed. She is constantly retweeting people from poorer countries being pissed at the rich for ruining our climate.
Then you are absolutely not paying attention at all whatsoever. In fact, the majority of the impact of GMO crops has been felt in countries where there was literally not enough food to go around. You’re welcome to your organics in a country as food secure as in the west but starving poor and middle income countries is not okay.
However this doesn’t really take away from my point that GMO didn’t fix world hunger. Farmers can save money by using less pesticide and have better crop yield all they want but that still doesn’t fix food not going to where it is needed.
This—on its own—doesn’t even take away from my weaker claim that „I doubt GMO has raised the standard of living for the average person“. Sure it has raised the standard of living for the farmers that have the option of swapping to GMO crops that previously needed a lot of pesticide. But unless you believe in some trickle down economic theory that will not automatically raise the standard of living to anyone else.
That all said I do find it a little handy that the quoted study only talks about maize, soy, and cotton. One of these is not even a food crop. And the two food crops here are notorious for giant industrial scale farms where much of the yield isn’t even for human consumption, but turned into feed for the meat industry. See it’s a problem of distribution. The profits of more maize and soy yield grown with less pesticide will most likely stay with the farmer, and even if they reduce the price of their price product, the profit from the cheaper crops will more likely go to the cattle farmer up stream with the cheaper feed. The standard of living for the average person will just remain the same, or—at best—marginally improve.
I mean sure. If GMO can help people, sure go ahead and grow them. But the fact is that so far GMO crops are limited to large agriculture giants and is not used to help with the global food safety net. Particularly not for feeding the poorer parts of the world.
In addition, dietary vitamin A deficiency can easily be fixed now (as well as 20 years ago; and even 120 years ago) with better food distribution. We have been shipping food for millennia. We don’t need golden rice or any other GMO to fix this problem.
Just to clarify, I’m not against them researching and growing golden rice. I am against them lying about how this crop can save the world from a problem that can be already easily be fixed with existing methods.