Inaction on Climate Change Could Cost the US Economy $14.5T by 2070
www2.deloitte.com
www2.deloitte.com
What I _never_ see costed is the other side - what negative cost will the climate policies have on GDP? I imagine that number to be far greater.
For example: Great, you increased fuel tax and got less people driving. Now people can't get to work, deliveries are now too costly, the cost of living increases because even basic items like food need to be transported to the store, with costs given directly to the consumer.
The single most concerning thing is that no politician appears to be doing these calculations. There is no open discussion about viable climate policies that don't crush the middle and working class into poverty.
You're not supposed to say it out loud when you're concern trolling. We've had the other side non stop from every politician and all media for decades. Even the 'left' politicians only do the bare minimum most watered down measures after decades of public pressure and ironclad science and not even that if there's a remote chance it could hurt their donors.
Solar is cheaper than any other option after ten or twenty years of serious investment. Initiating the cost drop has been an option for at least fifty and possibly 100 (as the first commercial PV panels were a technology with good cost efficiency and 5% energy efficiency and were produced decades before the photoelectric effect was discovered -- the creator thought they were thermoelectric initially) years simply by not actively propping up fossil fuel interests at immense cost and instead putting a fraction of that money into renewables.
Cars are the single biggest dead weight loss in any economy by orders of magnitude. Families are spending upwards of 30% of their income and a quarter to half of their productive hours on being able to participate in cities or towns that were intentionally demolished and rebuilt to make them unlivable without one at immense cost. Building walkable towns, trains, and density in place of cars reduces commute times, reduces deaths by hundreds of thousands per year and avoids millions of injuries and illnesses in a country the size of the US.
Without enforcing car ownership, land can be used much more effectively and housing can be far cheaper without dedicating more of a town's land to the car than the residents.
Then there are the trillions spent on destabilizing and invading countries with fossil fuel reserves to ensure they will sell it for a pittance only in USD and not give their workers livable conditions.
Insulation (and sharing 1-3 walls with your neighbors) is an unmitigated benefit to everyone, and all it would have needed is minor policy change.
The book explores the cost of: doing nothing to fight climate change vs doing everything to fight climate change vs doing something in the middle that optimizes global GDP (the book uses GDP as a "human welfare" metric).
My biggest take away from the book is that regardless of global temperature increases through the end of the century, global GDP is still projected to grow A TON. But because of the temperature increase, global GCP will grow _slightly_ less (like a few % less) that it otherwise would have. The wrong policies could cost GDP growth more than the temperature increase will.
Developed countries are quite well equipped (as in they're rich enough) to be able to adapt to the changing climate as needed. They can buy air conditioners, build dikes, choose not to build houses in areas prone to climate disaster, etc., all if which is insanely cheaper than attempting to reduce global temperature (though that's not an argument against any attempt to reduce global temperature). Making under-developed countries richer allows them to stop doing the "worser" things that aggravate climate change and make their populations unhealthy (like burning wood for a lot of their energy needs).
(This comment is just an elaboration on the arguments in the book I mentioned—not me being an expert.)
I don't think anybody here (even the author of the book presumably) is suggesting that they are cause and effect, but they do appear to be correlated.
Also just because 50% have 1% of the wealth, doesn't mean they don't contribute towards the wealth of the other 50% of people holding 99% of the wealth. For example, your boss gets the majority of the profit, but they couldn't run the company by themselves.
Probably somehow very few on hn.
Sooo we should probably even stop talking about it I assume?
Anyway you are aware of people/scientist saying things like 'much earlier than expected '?
We still don't know if the current scenarios will hold.
There should be a general sense that sustainability should benefit all of us.
Investing in long term topics should benefit us all as well.
I have a conscience others as well.
Also the economic version of it: mass migrations, labor shortages, unstable countries are bad for people in a service oriented society.
The riots in USA can be a typical symptom.
Of course USA is a bad example due to it being normal of having gated communities but other countries do not have that as extreme.
He's a political scientist, not a climate scientist but he seems to be working backwards from the agenda of "climate change is a liberal hoax" vs "we have a serious problem and need serious solutions to it".
I'd read it if I felt like there's valid knowledge to glean (i.e., ok, so what are the best thing to do) but not to put money in a denier's pocket.
I didn't find anything in the book about liberal hoaxes. Rather I found the author to be diligently addressing a topic they find to be quite serious. Their argument is not against climate change (they very much acknowledge we have to address it), but against what they view to be ineffective (i.e. very costly, not gonna do much to affect temperature rise) policies.
A good portion of the book is dedicated to the author's ideas for more effective ways to deal with climate change in the long run, like pumping a lot more money into R&D, looking into nuclear more, helping developing nations shed climate-aggravating technologies faster, drafting local "adapt to the climate" policies, etc. The author is in favor of a carbon tax. Another idea explored is how making the right growth-promoting improvements in developing countries during the next 20 years could enable them to deal with climate change better over the subsequent 50 years (vs short-term growth-slowing policies that might look great during elections, but don't do much to move the needle by 2100).
I read the article you linked and found it hard to interpret it as anything other than a hit piece with an almost hysterical focus on painting the book and its author in the most negative light possible. It was quite a contrast from the book where the author makes their criticisms in the vein of "I think we can do better".
I'll read the link I shared (again) to compare and contrast, as well as look for other reviews.
I'm in the camp that is terrified of what Climate Change has in store for us, and I want to understand it to understand what is truly scary versus what is being ginned up. While the media loves to get us excited I have to say that this time they're justified from what I know so far.
I was initially excited to see someone asking a question about a topic that I had _just_ read a book on (I also discussed the book for a few hours in a book group). It seemed like sharing that was a goodwill thing to do.
I'm betting we overshoot +3c by a fair bit. Given how little progress has been made (emissions are still _accelerating_), I'm at least pleased to see some resource that doesn't merely talk about +1.5c. We've passed that point already. The IPCC's 6th report estimates that if we merely burn the GHGs that are easily accessible via our existing mines, oil rigs, etc, we're headed to +2.5c.
I really hope that Deloitte's report here does some good by giving financial numbers to people who only care about the numbers. (But I doubt it. Very few people with ANY decision-making power will be alive in 2100. "Why worry? I'll be dead.")
But 2021 was the biggest (full year) of emissions ever, more than covering the 2020 decrease. I don't know of any resources that track quarterly emissions, so I don't know if we can see whether 2022 is on-pace for another record year. Perhaps the price of oil reduced usage enough to reduce emissions this year compared to last, but I won't hold my breath.
GHG emissions are dropping year-over-year in developed nations, and developing nations will follow. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/carb...
In other words: you are both right.
2000 to 2020 seems like a steeper line upwards than 1980 to 1990, but yea, since 2011, it does seem we've rounded the corner.
I will adjust my belief. Thanks.
Of course, most goals set in Paris and Glasgow are shot to hell.
If this spreads to other nations, we need to recalibrate what type of goals we set. was
The focus needs to be developing ways to mitigate the impact. Climate is never static. One major geologic event can do more climate harm than hundreds of years of human industry.
Commercial whaling probably did more climate harm than anything we’re doing now because it broke the iron cycle that is vital to plankton blooms
In 50 years we will have a massive population collapse, the US have been below replacement level for 50 years. China is even worse.
Prepare yourself to see massive employees shortage getting worse and worse.
The only thing keeping population aflot is longevity extension but 80yo don’t produce or consume much.
For climate in 50 years... Where humans will be. Consider that the internet was at the beginning 20 years ago.
Where was solar and EV 20 years ago.
I am bullish on human creativity, much less so on Deloitte and the governments.
I can't find any serious prediction of imminent collapse.
The result is that it’s not apparent when you look at population. But aging is having a massive effect on the economy, the job sector, etc.
At some point it’s going to collapse, but because we have been below replacement for a long time it’s not going to stop anytime soon.
Look at Japan, Italy to see what is coming (they are a bit ahead) Last year japan lost 800 000 of population. At some point the japanese culture will disappear if they don’t start having babies (really not happening at the moment)
I heard that in Japan they sell more adult diaper than baby diapers...
So we have more living people but they are older and older. At some point it will fall unless we find more and more way to extend lifespan. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-by-gdp...
The presence of many degrees of freedom does not make them all equally influential.
“Inaction will lead to an ice age costing $X by 2020”
meanwhile there’s another thread here about a “Contrarian VC” investing in climate change…
There is good reason to believe it isn't over and a glacial period will return.
If I move a shovel full of dirt to the same place in my backyard every day for 20 years, I'm going to have a big pile of dirt there.
It's the same for climate. If we keep dumping CO2 into the atmosphere, physics says we're going to warm the planet. It's a more complex system than the dirt pile, but no reasonable person thinks some unknown unknown is going to randomly overturn that and cause an ice age (other than possibly nuclear winter).
We can see the warming signal from CO2 in history and we can reasonably project the future as well, if current emissions continue.
But > 10 years out, unpredictable technological innovation (either improvements to decarbonization tech or other tech that would make a lack of decarbonization irrelevant) would almost certainly change the path we're on to a point where projecting the current path isn't useful. To that point, Deloitte's finding of "insufficient action" on climate change couldn't possibly take into account actions happening today that could build toward useful climate change solutions if their only concept of action is applying existing tech to the problem.
Not that I disagree with your general point, But this is why prediction is tricky, because unexpected flooding and your prediction is false.
I know it doesn’t show on co2 concentration yet.
Solar, wind power, batteries, EV are all on exponential growth curves.
In 10 years we will be in a much different place.
This is completely false. We are not interpolating with climate science, we are extrapolating. That is why the variance in the models is so wide (and expands rapidly). That variance, also, only applies to the known mechanisms: when a new important factor shows up, that can cause the predictions to be very wrong. This happened with ocean acidification in the early 2010's - the climate models had predicted increasing temperature, but it didn't materialize because the oceans were absorbing a lot more CO2 than we thought.
In your example, an earthquake, a tornado, a flood, a strong storm, another person stealing your dirt, or even a heavy wind can make your projection false. You can keep doing the same thing, but you will have no idea how big that dirt pile will be 20 years from now.