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Hello everyone! Happy to be back with you all. Today I’m going to talk a bit about how to discuss the economic consequences of climate change, including a few tips on how to counter the propaganda that decarbonization will impose exorbitant costs on consumers.
This post was inspired by a new climate-economics study that was published this week. In this study scientists affiliated with The Potsdamn Institute for Climate Impact Research show that, relative to a hypothetical world without climate change, “the world economy is committed to an income reduction of 19% within the next 26 years independent of future emission choices.” The researchers also estimate that by 2049 — a mere 25 years from now —global climate damages will cost around $38 trillion per year. Yes, that’s $38 trillion per year.
These are staggering numbers. And what’s really crazy about them is that they were derived from extrapolations of empirical obvservations of the historical relationship between temperature changes and growth rates alone. When “further climactic components” (like wildfires and droughts, for examples) were factored in, the researchers’ estimate of future damages rose even higher — by approximately 50%. So these numbers are likely underestimates of what we’re actually facing.
There’s a lot to say about this study, but what strikes me first is that it’s a stark piece of evidence that the fossil-fuel economy is not only damaging the planet, but also undermining the conditions of its own existence. There can be no more illusion that the economy will continue to hum along apace, insulating the affluent, as the planet heats up. Ecology is integrated with the economy. (I mean, of course it is!) You can use this study as evidence of that fact.
This study also gives every climate communicator a tool to use against the disinformation that decarbonization’s costs will be ruinous. In truth, the real economic damage will be done by continuing down the path we’re currently on. If we do not swerve — if the world fails to phase out fossil fuels — the productive economy of the past will be destroyed in our lifetimes. Or, certianly, in our childrens’ lifetimes.
So, in short, any time you hear someone talk about the “costs” of decarbonization, you can use these numbers to remind them (or to signal to the people reading or listening to fossil-fuel messaging about the costs of net zero), that those costs must always be weighed against the costs of not phasing out fossil fuels and failing to create a net-zero-emissions system. In balance, the costs of decarbonization are not costs at all, but necessary investements that will allow at least relative prosperity to continue.
(I will say a lot more about how to message climate-change economics — while explaining why to date it’s been so hard to make the case that decarbonization costs less than climate change — in my forthcoming book. For now take these kernels and plant them everywhere you can!)
Before I end, I’d like to write a post-script about “doomism,” the attitude that it’s too late to prevent the collapse of civilization due to climate change. This study obviously provides plentiful fuel for the caustic fires of doomist despair. Things are definitely going to get worse, no matter what the world does now. And that feels very sad. But remember: that fact doesn’t mean it’s too late to halt global heating.
Every tenth of a degree matters. Every retired coal plant; every cancelled LNG terminal; every person who decides no longer to eat beef regularly; every new builidng built with electrified heating and cooking; every time we force our elected officials to make decisions that get the world closer to phasing out fossil fuels: each one of these events matters. We cannot have a net-zero global economy without each of these events happening.
It can be a terrible burden to be the person who knows what’s coming down the pipe. But it’s up to us to know what we know and to keep moving forward, so that when other people join us they can keep moving forward too. (Not to mention — so that we can also live with ourselves at the end of the day.) In any case, you are not alone. I am here, imagining each and every one of you reading these posts and then going out and helping. We are a little community — and there are many such little communities around the world that we don’t even know anything about. Who knows how we’ll all come together. But we must have a commitment in oursleves, for ourselves, to continue to end climate silence and to do what we can to phase out fossil fuels — and then we must hold faith that, even though we cannot know how, things might in fact turn out better than we in our ignorance could possibly imagine.
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