3 ms·
Not a catastrophe for whom is the obvious question here.
by claudeganon 7y ago
Not a catastrophe for whom is the obvious question here.
- rayiner 7y agoPretty much everybody: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/20/climate-change-to-slow-global-economic-growth-new-study-finds.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/20/climate-change-to-slow-globa... > In other words, if global GDP doubles or halves by 2100, the results suggest real GDP per capita would still be 7.22% below where it would be otherwise. For most of the world, an RCP8.5 scenario is equivalent to knocking out 3-4 years of GDP growth. Bad, but not catastrophic, and probably less bad than the impact of "WWII-style mobilization" and shifting the economy into command-and-control mode.
- claudeganon 7y agoPointing at GDP over and over again is at a best a fuzzy indicator of overall well-being, especially in the developed world where inequality has unmoored it from improvement in material standards for many people. Amazon stock prices skyrocketing tells you little about the health or well-being of their workforce.
- rayiner 7y agoGDP is the number we have. It's not perfect, but it's better than trying to assess the costs without reference to numbers. More significantly, GDP per capita gives a strong measure of the country's capacity to provide for well being, including through redistribution. The specific redistributive policies we adopt or not are mostly orthogonal to climate change.