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> Whole swathes of humanity were ordered indoors! It was achieved at untold cost Climate change has untold cost too, so what you’re saying doesn’t have much we

> Whole swathes of humanity were ordered indoors! It was achieved at untold cost Climate change has untold cost too, so what you’re saying doesn’t have much weight.

rayiner 6y ago
No, climate change has costs that we can estimate and base our decisions on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_impacts_of_climate_change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_impacts_of_climate_ch... The foregone economic activity in just one year of lockdowns in the US is a significant fraction of cumulative worldwide damages anticipated from climate change through 2050.
- baron_harkonnen 6y ago
  I have never read any serious research that proposes what you are proposing: that climate mitigation is going to cost more than the consequences of failing to mitigate it. We're on the path to a 4C world by something like 2100. An increase by that much might possibly wipe out the species. If it fall short of that forecast the damage will be far greater. Not to mention that pandemic shares the same root cause as climate change. Destroying our ecosystem has increased the incident of zoonotic spillover. We'll see more pandemics as we continue on this path. And the costs of these are not separate from the costs of climate change.
  - rayiner 6y ago
    > We're on the path to a 4C world by something like 2100. An increase by that much might possibly wipe out the species. That is absolutely not what scientists and economists are predicting. An RCP 8.5 scenario (which is considered on the worse side of what's likely in a "do nothing" world) is expected to knock 6.7-14.3% of US GDP by 2100: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/20191025_ES_THP_Environmental_Facts_FINAL.pdf https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/2019102... (p. 7). That would be about half as bad as the COVID lockdowns (but permanent): https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/30/us-gdp-q2-2020-first-reading.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/30/us-gdp-q2-2020-first-reading.... Note that's a 14.3% hit compared to what GDP would be in 2100. That's a big impact. It's equivalent to going from 3% annual GDP growth between then and now to 2.7% annual GDP growth. Now, the numbers hide some really terrible costs. The Florida and Gulf coast will become uninhabitable, destroying half the economy in those areas. To put it into perspective the 2018 California wildfires cost 0.75% of GDP. So this is like 20 times worse. It's bad! But it's not an "untold cost." It's not an outcome worth spending any amount to avoid. Scientists don't think mitigation will cost more than the damages from climate change, because scientists aren't proposing to mitigate climate change by shutting down the economy the way we did during the COIVD lockdown. That's an insanely inefficient way to achieve mitigation. I mentioned the economic loss from COVID lockdown not to suggest that is actually how we would reduce emissions, but to put into perspective what the expected costs of climate change are. Saying that climate change will have "untold cost" is problematic because it makes you believe that mitigation strategies that will have massive costs will be justified to avoid climate change damages. It's worth the U.S. spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year on climate-change mitigation. The EU is planning on spending 260 billion euro annually by 2030. That's roughly the scale of Biden's plan. But the "World War II-style" mobilization of the economy that Green New Deal advocates want will hurt economic growth by more than climate change will. If we go from 3% annual GDP growth to 2% annually we'll shoot ourselves in the foot.
    - runarberg 6y ago
      > Saying that climate change will have "untold cost" is problematic because it makes you believe that mitigation strategies that will have massive costs will be justified to avoid climate change damages I’m not aware of any existing technology capable that will mitigate the harm that the current trajectory of the climate disaster is projected to cause. Hoping for new technology that can save us from the harm 30 year from now is naive. Thirty years ago we had quantum computers, microwaves, GMO, lithium-ion batteries, etc. VTVL rockets are a 25 year old technology already. Hoping for something that doesn’t exist already will save us is simply a disillusion. In honesty “shutting down the economy” is still a better option then “business as usual”. Although, honestly, I thing there is a better option: Investing in green infrastructure, along with International agreements, and carbon taxes, which we could integrate into existing societal systems to at least slow down the harm until technology is available that can save us from this catastrophe.
      - rayiner 6y ago
        By mitigation I don’t mean “after the fact cleanup” I mean to reduce the amount of climate change that happens. (Saying “stopping” or “averting” climate change seems wrong in this context since we’re definitely going to hit 1.5 or probably 2C). Shutting down the economy is not better than business as usual. Business as usual is worse than cost-effective mitigations. Scientists estimate those could cost up to $1 trillion per year, worldwide, by 2030. That’s under 2% of GDP. Damage from climate change in an RCP 8.5 scenario will be many times that, 7-15% in the US by 2100. But it still won’t be nearly as bad as the COVID shutdowns, which wacked 30% off GDP while they were in effect.
        runarberg 6y ago
        So by “cost effective mitigation” I presume you mean something akin to: Investing in green infrastructure, international agreements, and carbon tax, right?
        rayiner 6y ago
- runarberg 6y ago
  So loosing a large part of Bangladesh to the sea by 2050 and then loosing more to the sea by 2051, and even more by 2052, etc. with no hope of recovering... displacing therein tens to hundreds of millions of people that will need new homes, and new infrastructure that is requiring housing, feeding and transporting those people is going to cost less then then a year and a half of pandemic? I would love to see your calculations for this.
  - rayiner 6y ago
    See: https://phys.org/news/2019-11-climate-impacts-world-trillion.html https://phys.org/news/2019-11-climate-impacts-world-trillion...
    - runarberg 6y ago
      I mean, sure... if we count to 2050 and then stop counting... maybe. But that is not how the world works. We need to count beyond 2050 to get a good estimate. If (and that is a big if; ’cause I don’t really trust this number) the climate impact is gonna cost 7.9 trillion dollars by 2050, I’m sure it will cost $8.4tr by 2051, and $12.5tr by 2055, $22tr by 2060 and then $120tr by 2070. And then maybe by 2100 the economy as we know it will have collapsed and any cost estimate is void. The climate impact is getting more severe at an exponential rate, and—unlike the pandemic—it is not gonna get better in the foreseeable future.
      - rayiner 6y ago
        Yes, but the cost of ratcheting down the economy through lockdowns to reduce emissions also has a continuing cost. And no, climate change, even if we do nothing, won’t cause the economy to collapse by 2100: https://www.factcheck.org/2019/03/how-much-will-the-green-new-deal-cost/ https://www.factcheck.org/2019/03/how-much-will-the-green-ne... > “While it is true that we estimated damages as high as 10% of GDP annually at the end of the century for warming of 15°F above pre-industrial levels, the odds of a temperature change that would drive damages of this magnitude are slim,” he wrote. “In fact, they are less than 1-in-100 by our original calculation.” It’s worth spending a lot of money to avoid a 10% GDP loss. But it’s not worth spending the kind of money you’d be willing to spend if you thought the economy was going to collapse completely otherwise.
- redisman 6y ago
  That’s kind of absurd though. Destroying large swaths of nature for good isn’t well reflected in “what % of GDP is that?”
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]

> Whole swathes of humanity were ordered indoors! It was achieved at untold cost Climate change has untold cost too, so what you’re saying doesn’t have much weight.

rayiner 6y ago

No, climate change has costs that we can estimate and base our decisions on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_impacts_of_climate_change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_impacts_of_climate_ch... The foregone economic activity in just one year of lockdowns in the US is a significant fraction of cumulative worldwide damages anticipated from climate change through 2050.

baron_harkonnen 6y ago
I have never read any serious research that proposes what you are proposing: that climate mitigation is going to cost more than the consequences of failing to mitigate it. We're on the path to a 4C world by something like 2100. An increase by that much might possibly wipe out the species. If it fall short of that forecast the damage will be far greater. Not to mention that pandemic shares the same root cause as climate change. Destroying our ecosystem has increased the incident of zoonotic spillover. We'll see more pandemics as we continue on this path. And the costs of these are not separate from the costs of climate change.
- rayiner 6y ago
  > We're on the path to a 4C world by something like 2100. An increase by that much might possibly wipe out the species. That is absolutely not what scientists and economists are predicting. An RCP 8.5 scenario (which is considered on the worse side of what's likely in a "do nothing" world) is expected to knock 6.7-14.3% of US GDP by 2100: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/20191025_ES_THP_Environmental_Facts_FINAL.pdf https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/2019102... (p. 7). That would be about half as bad as the COVID lockdowns (but permanent): https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/30/us-gdp-q2-2020-first-reading.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/30/us-gdp-q2-2020-first-reading.... Note that's a 14.3% hit compared to what GDP would be in 2100. That's a big impact. It's equivalent to going from 3% annual GDP growth between then and now to 2.7% annual GDP growth. Now, the numbers hide some really terrible costs. The Florida and Gulf coast will become uninhabitable, destroying half the economy in those areas. To put it into perspective the 2018 California wildfires cost 0.75% of GDP. So this is like 20 times worse. It's bad! But it's not an "untold cost." It's not an outcome worth spending any amount to avoid. Scientists don't think mitigation will cost more than the damages from climate change, because scientists aren't proposing to mitigate climate change by shutting down the economy the way we did during the COIVD lockdown. That's an insanely inefficient way to achieve mitigation. I mentioned the economic loss from COVID lockdown not to suggest that is actually how we would reduce emissions, but to put into perspective what the expected costs of climate change are. Saying that climate change will have "untold cost" is problematic because it makes you believe that mitigation strategies that will have massive costs will be justified to avoid climate change damages. It's worth the U.S. spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year on climate-change mitigation. The EU is planning on spending 260 billion euro annually by 2030. That's roughly the scale of Biden's plan. But the "World War II-style" mobilization of the economy that Green New Deal advocates want will hurt economic growth by more than climate change will. If we go from 3% annual GDP growth to 2% annually we'll shoot ourselves in the foot.
  - runarberg 6y ago
    > Saying that climate change will have "untold cost" is problematic because it makes you believe that mitigation strategies that will have massive costs will be justified to avoid climate change damages I’m not aware of any existing technology capable that will mitigate the harm that the current trajectory of the climate disaster is projected to cause. Hoping for new technology that can save us from the harm 30 year from now is naive. Thirty years ago we had quantum computers, microwaves, GMO, lithium-ion batteries, etc. VTVL rockets are a 25 year old technology already. Hoping for something that doesn’t exist already will save us is simply a disillusion. In honesty “shutting down the economy” is still a better option then “business as usual”. Although, honestly, I thing there is a better option: Investing in green infrastructure, along with International agreements, and carbon taxes, which we could integrate into existing societal systems to at least slow down the harm until technology is available that can save us from this catastrophe.
    - rayiner 6y ago
      By mitigation I don’t mean “after the fact cleanup” I mean to reduce the amount of climate change that happens. (Saying “stopping” or “averting” climate change seems wrong in this context since we’re definitely going to hit 1.5 or probably 2C). Shutting down the economy is not better than business as usual. Business as usual is worse than cost-effective mitigations. Scientists estimate those could cost up to $1 trillion per year, worldwide, by 2030. That’s under 2% of GDP. Damage from climate change in an RCP 8.5 scenario will be many times that, 7-15% in the US by 2100. But it still won’t be nearly as bad as the COVID shutdowns, which wacked 30% off GDP while they were in effect.
      - runarberg 6y ago
        So by “cost effective mitigation” I presume you mean something akin to: Investing in green infrastructure, international agreements, and carbon tax, right?
        rayiner 6y ago
runarberg 6y ago
So loosing a large part of Bangladesh to the sea by 2050 and then loosing more to the sea by 2051, and even more by 2052, etc. with no hope of recovering... displacing therein tens to hundreds of millions of people that will need new homes, and new infrastructure that is requiring housing, feeding and transporting those people is going to cost less then then a year and a half of pandemic? I would love to see your calculations for this.
- rayiner 6y ago
  See: https://phys.org/news/2019-11-climate-impacts-world-trillion.html https://phys.org/news/2019-11-climate-impacts-world-trillion...
  - runarberg 6y ago
    I mean, sure... if we count to 2050 and then stop counting... maybe. But that is not how the world works. We need to count beyond 2050 to get a good estimate. If (and that is a big if; ’cause I don’t really trust this number) the climate impact is gonna cost 7.9 trillion dollars by 2050, I’m sure it will cost $8.4tr by 2051, and $12.5tr by 2055, $22tr by 2060 and then $120tr by 2070. And then maybe by 2100 the economy as we know it will have collapsed and any cost estimate is void. The climate impact is getting more severe at an exponential rate, and—unlike the pandemic—it is not gonna get better in the foreseeable future.
    - rayiner 6y ago
      Yes, but the cost of ratcheting down the economy through lockdowns to reduce emissions also has a continuing cost. And no, climate change, even if we do nothing, won’t cause the economy to collapse by 2100: https://www.factcheck.org/2019/03/how-much-will-the-green-new-deal-cost/ https://www.factcheck.org/2019/03/how-much-will-the-green-ne... > “While it is true that we estimated damages as high as 10% of GDP annually at the end of the century for warming of 15°F above pre-industrial levels, the odds of a temperature change that would drive damages of this magnitude are slim,” he wrote. “In fact, they are less than 1-in-100 by our original calculation.” It’s worth spending a lot of money to avoid a 10% GDP loss. But it’s not worth spending the kind of money you’d be willing to spend if you thought the economy was going to collapse completely otherwise.
redisman 6y ago
That’s kind of absurd though. Destroying large swaths of nature for good isn’t well reflected in “what % of GDP is that?”
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]