If those numbers seem impossible to comprehend, then let Bloomberg break it down for you, “planetary warming will result in an income reduction of 19% globally by mid-century, compared to a global economy without climate change.
This is the largest study of this kind I know of; it comes from the Potsdam Institute in Germany, and as James Murray, writing in BusinessGreen points out, it’s more “granular and empirical” than past efforts. It concludes that these losses are already locked in, thanks to the carbon and methane we’ve already poured into the air. […]
If anything, as Murray points out, the numbers are quite likely conservative:
The projected damages are mainly the result of rising average temperatures and changes in rainfall and temperature variability. But other weather extremes that are harder to model, such as storms or wildfires, could result in higher economic costs. The study also assumes that over time economies start to adapt to more intense climate impacts, serving to curb the resulting negative economic impacts. As climate scientists have repeatedly warned, there are plausible scenarios where some regions find it near impossible to adapt and development is thrown into reverse. Such outcomes would trigger huge geo-political risks that could impact the entire global economy.
There are a couple of things to say here.
One, some of you may remember the famous Limits to Growth report from the early 1970s. It predicted that without serious efforts to change our demands on the planet, economic growth would begin to suffer right about now. We thought about it as a society and then, with the election of Ronald Reagan, rejected it; we are now harvesting that bitter fruit. If we don’t act now then our children may wish they still had bitter fruit to harvest.
Two, capitalism—which regularly acts homicidally—is acting truly suicidally. Having been warned for years now, it resists every effort to rein in its excesses. As Exxon’s CEO helpfully explained earlier this year, it’s not that you couldn’t make good money from renewable energy—you just couldn’t make ‘above average returns’ because sunshine is free. So instead we’ll tank the world, and with it the world economy (which is a subset of the first, not the other way round).
In Europe, for instance, climate protest has finally persuaded regulators to start slowing loans to the fossil fuel industry—but new data this week makes it clear that the slack is being taken up by American banks, and not just the mighty money center banks that are already most deeply implicated in this immoral trade. Now regional banks are taking it up too.
The original Earth Day in 1970 happened in a societal moment that isn’t easily replicated, but it does teach that there is still more to do in filling the streets and campuses with young people and people young at heart who see the danger of climate change for what it is.
What that original Earth Day represented was not just norm change but a sociopolitical tipping point in environmental concern—the kind of positive tipping point we need to reach on climate change as well. And it will come. But it has to be our collective mission to make it come sooner.