Climate impact of a transatlantic flight could cost global economy $3k

“For every tonne of carbon dioxide emitted, the global economy would be $3,000 worse off by the end of the century, they estimated.”

Going after aviation again. Do these types of articles market well?

Hopefully, someday someone will start looking at the climate change problem intelligently.

the world still generates 80% of its electricity with fossil fuels.

The thousands of coal power plants in particular are extremely bad.

Doing this for decades is the real problem.

This implies gasoline costs society $30 per gallon.

Here's the math.

Each gallon of gasoline in the USA costs roughly $4. Burning the gallon of gasoline creates roughly 10kg of carbon dioxide.

1 ton of emissions therefore equates to roughly 100 gallons of gas. (100 x 10 kg = 1000 kg = 1 ton)

So, in the USA you paid $400 for those 100 gallons.

But the social impact of those emissions is $3,000.

If taxed properly, this implies gas would be $30/gallon.

Think about that next time you drive, fly...and figure out how to build better solutions. When you buy gas you're getting it for a steal, paying $4 for something that costs the world $30. It's hard to resist!

We need to be carbon neutral yesterday, and also remove carbon dioxide from the air that's already there.

(If of interest, for more background on this, check out Michael Greenstone's work at the University of Chicago on the "social cost of carbon".)

When they say "global economy $3000" do they mean, like, 3000 of us have got to chip in a buck? Because $3000 is a very low figure to make a sensationalism article out of.

I feel like this is written for a specific purpose. Someone will know what it means, but it's not us.

What does transatlantic have anything to do with it? A flight from NYC to SFO is bad too.

Researchers at Cambridge University, University College London and Imperial College London, as well as international partners from Switzerland, Germany, the US and Austria found that

> For every tonne of carbon dioxide emitted, the global economy would be $3,000 worse off by the end of the century, they estimated.

This is because they observed that the time it takes for communities to recover from natural disasters takes more than a few months.

I would like to see the study(ies) the researchers put out so that I can see what kind of assumptions they made. I did not see their work referenced in the article.

This article is very vague. I get the feeling it doesn’t link to the underlying source research on purpose. This $3000 is the predicted cost over the remainder of the century, which means the present day value of the claimed impact is a lot lower. I also wonder if they accounted for the economic and social benefits of the flight to keep things balanced. And do they compound the benefits into the future as well, to perform an even accounting of 2100 costs versus benefits? I’m guessing not.

3000 sounds high figure. Could then one calculate how much we can emit until costs go negative, that is entire global economy is gone?

$3k per ton seems quite high and if so would make even current direct air capture tech at $500-$600 per ton a bargain.

Every tonne of carbon emitted imposes $3000 in costs? That must mean that every ton of carbon emitted also provides at least $3000 in benefits, because humanity is a lot richer on net since we began blasting the stuff into our atmosphere a few hundred years ago.

Or, their calculation is off. Could be either one.