Estimate is COVID in 2020 cost 3.4% of GDP (source: https://www.statista.com/topics/6139/covid-19-impact-on-the-...)
We are talking about one new COVID (2020 style), every single year for 25 years. That is significant enough to not spontaneously do it.
Not disagreeing that there should be a lot more funding of climate change reducing endeavors, I just don't think that GDP should/could be an anchor to base that on.
At some point we will find a series of bottlenecks. But up to a 30% reduction (with ~100% clean electricity) it's obviously clear, and it looks doable up to ~90% (electricity, transportation, heating, and some industry converted).
Energy investments are some 3% of the GDP, diverting those is an almost complete non-brainier. But we'd need to get about as much from other places.
You have to make up your mind, if you are concerned about real resources or fictional ones.
If we want to optimise for real resources we would round up all the people who’s job is to destroy real resources, like casino pit bosses and the managers of Prada and fast fashion that destroy clothing to create artificial scarcity.
And we would kick them out in the rain to do tree planting.
Climate change threatens a lot more than 5% of real reseouces - in fact what happens when the Middle East and American Midwest runs out of underground water reserves?
It's not a neck and neck race, what has happened is one region drains its aquifers first and then silently raids the other's ...
* https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/in-drought-stricken-ar...
* https://www.cbsnews.com/news/saudi-company-fondomonte-arizon...
Anyway, that's what my sort of point is. Much of the GDP is spent on dumb stuff like holding stocks, gold, art and Prada bags. When you divert a percentage of that to be spent on real resources it can have major effects. Kind of like how when leisure travel became affordable for regular people, suddenly air travel and cruise ships started to have an outsized effect on climate.
Unfortunately it’s all part of the same tragedy of the commons and coordination problem.
IMO for labor, I'd say ~80% of jobs are more or less completely worthless. Many, many industries don't produce anything at all, they just move intellectual stuff from point A to point B, slap their existence on it, and shave off a few cents for themselves.
There is a demographic conflict of interest between those who will be alive in 2050 and those who will not. The long-term gains are difficult to deny. The short-term costs, however, will be massive.
And no, I won't be around by 2050.
By not doing that, you free up quite a bit of tax money. I can't imagine it's the whole 30% but it would bring it down. Emissions tax would be another way to fund this figure at the same time as having corporations find ways to reduce emissions
Making these changes are investments with real payoff in the near term.
The real impediment is that fossil fuels have made some people incredibly rich, and they are actively fighting these changes to protect their income.
Is there a source for this? If you're referencing LCOE, remember that does not account for storage costs for intermittent power sources (wind, solar) so it's an incredibly misleading number.
Roughly parity for LCOE once storage is added.
Battery prices continues to drop and in short order it will be flat out cheaper with storage included: https://rmi.org/the-rise-of-batteries-in-six-charts-and-not-...
Add to that investments in the national grid and general energy efficiency it's doable: https://www.nrel.gov/analysis/100-percent-clean-electricity-...
Again, the only reason to not pursue this is to keep the fossil fuel companies profits flowing, and that isn't very compelling.
> The Lazard study looked at the “cost of firming,” which consists of building extra capacity to back up solar and wind, for example, leading to an increase in total costs. When included, the economic advantage for solar and wind over gas narrows considerably, and in some cases gas at the low end of the cost curve beats out “firm” solar and wind projects, particularly in California where costs of firming are higher.
> The headline LCOE costs look really striking for solar and wind, but when those firming costs are included, renewables “do not look as low-cost as the first LCOE figures imply,” Patiño-Echeverri said.
There doesn't need to be a fossil fuel boogeyman behind every decision to continue the status quo. Sometimes the math is the math. Hopefully that will change in the future.
That's why mass media is so keen to blame everything on your mom ("boomers"), along with immigrants, robots, woke mind viruses, etc.
Real median wages have gone up more than inflation has over the last few years. It's just not evenly distributed.
If you read Drawdown, you'll see that it doesn't cost money to stop climate change, it saves money.
As long as it has value to people - it is real.
Meaning, as long as you can use it to buy things. And that is what people care about.
That stops the moment, people don't believe in the currency anymore. Then they will either use a different currency they do trust - or go back to trade little pieces of gold.
Do you account for unpredictable, but climate changing, events like solar flare activity and volcanic activity, which also can contribute?
But anyway, I don't believe half the numbers out there.
To cut emissions, we need to kill materialism, consumption economy and most importantly tell people that they should choose between what's good for them (eating a burger to make them happy) or the planet (not bringing the equivalent pollution of driving an SUV 50 miles+ by eating something much less polluting than beef).
Governments will keep chasing the kind of changes that can only make more money, not less.
That’s a moral statement not a factual one. To cut emissions, we need to do exactly that. Pricing in externalities (yes it means less beef but that’s not the same thing as an end to the world as we know it) and investing in cleaner means of production is enough. Most of the people pushing for large societal changes are doing it because it was their goal from the start and they are using climate change as a mean to an end.
You can simply add a tax at entry to match your own carbon tax until evening rules are added into trade deals. The fact that such a tax is not in place in neither the USA nor the EU is proof enough to me that neither is serious about stopping global warming.
Plus the human population will soon be drastically contracting anyway.
Abandoning the only system since the birth of humanity to bring prosperity to billions in favour of one which has repeatedly be an utter failure, systematically lead to totalitarianism and is responsible for millions of death might not be the wisest choice especially when it’s pushed by people who think they should be amongst the rulers due to their moral superiority.
I run my apartment on LEDs I haven’t changed in 4 years and I max out at 100W. When I was a child, that was the power of one fairly bright living room reading light
And for those we have viable solutions that either do not lower subjective quality of living or even improve it, but they are not sufficiently implemented by enough people.
Telling folks to stop eating beef now is compounding the problem by making people just give up.
We should first address the things that we have viable solutions for instead of loosing public support by insisting on reducing emissions in areas where there are no good solutions yet and some sort of asceticism seems to be in order.
Methane is between 30 and 200 times more dangerous than CO2 and a single cow produces 200 pounds of it per year.
Another fun fact: the mass of all cattle on the planet is higher than all other animals combined. All of them from cats to rhinos and wild horses.
> Telling folks to stop eating beef now is compounding the problem by making people just give up.
That's exactly my point: the real issues aren't related to government policies related to just focusing on CO2 emissions from energy but how much and what we consume.
What we eat, by far, is the element that most impacts the planet. By far. The others, besides using more public transport are very small.
But nobody wants to hear or face it because it implies how we live and eat.
Hell a single cotton shirt requires 2000 liters of fresh water, a scarce resource, I don't see as much arguments about how we consume but plenty of neverending EV and electricity gaslighting.
It's much simpler to point at vague problems
That‘s a surprisingly small amount of water. Just a typical shower uses 150 liters and all it does is keeping you clean for a day. On the other hand a cotton shirt can last many years.
Are you saying the water is lost or destroyed or permanently polluted? This is, of course, not the case either.
One of the biggest disasters ever, the draining of the sea of Aral (back then shared across 7 countries) has been caused by the insane water needs of cotton farming in Uzbekistan.
So yes, not only the water there has been lost forever, and millions have been impacted in their health, livelihood, farming, etc, and all for what? Shoving $5 t-shirts for the fast fashion industry?
The cotton industry is actually very harmful for the planet, not just in central asia, but those are the many insanely huge problems that people don't want to talk about, because got forbid we stop shoving our closets with low quality junk fast fashion that we quickly forget exists.
And all of this goes back to my point. Consuming stuff is toxic for the planet, the easiest way to curb the evil impact we have on it is to at least try to understand how we could easily curb it with limiting our everyday actions.
Not only you can substitute beef for pork, pork for poultry many times and have a positive effect, you can also decide to buy better clothes that fit you better and last longer. And many other things.
No it isn‘t.
One example is air traffic. If you don't consume an available flight, then you don't actually help the climate, because somebody else will buy the seat at a lower price. This is just market economics. To reduce flying the society already has put Carbon credits out there for airlines to buy if they want to fly from A to B. These credits reflect the cost which society puts on flying currently.
Oh, I agree, I'm not against eliminating anything, but a pollution sort of tax I would be perfectly fine with.
Like eggs taxed more than tomatoes, poultry more than eggs, pig more than poultry, etc, etc.
But it has to be taxed enough to make some dent in it.
Assuming there is validity to the numbers (and no new source of energy), it means you need to reduce GDP by 2-5% yearly until 2050. But GDP and money is a "sliding" scale so it might mean something different by next year.
Replacing high CO2 intensity activities (burning coal) with lesser intensive tasks (e.g. burning gas or renewables) is the key.
Solar and other renewables counteract their Co2 expenditure after 1-2 years.
It will be necessary to lower demand for fossil fuel enough that new prospecting becomes unprofitable. This will happen eventually due to the physics of oil drilling.
If you consider the amount of energy contributed to the world economy from fossil fuels, there is no clear path how to market alternatives in quantities that can make fossil fuels obsolete.
A more realistic scenario for around 2050 is that coal-power increases while oil for personal transportation is replaced by batteries due to high oil price.
Of course you need to spend money and energy (specially energy, everything in the universe is energy), but the solution is not to stop moving. We need to use energy and resources in order to switch to better technologies.
GDP measures the total production of an economy. That is mostly equivalent to energy_consumption * p_efficiency.
Investing in new technologies that increase efficiency has always been a good decision. Maybe you can improve solar panels by a further 5% and batteries by 10%?
Realistically, energy_consumption will need to decrease, but that isn't actually that terrible.
Again, GDP measures how much money is spent within a country, if there are several intermediaries in a supply chain, the cost of products and services increases and the GDP tends to rise.
If a country change direction and leans towards nuclear energy, the GDP (that is in fact a terrible measure) will increase cause the new expenditures.
I recall the report mentioned that societies already spend more in GDP per year to adapt to climate change (e.g. building more AC units) than it would cost to mitigate climate change.
1. Spending Wisely: Invest in technologies that work and also do not introduce more problems.
2. Trusting Who Spends: Governments or others must use funds on solving the issue (not just giving money to cronies).
3. Global Cooperation: Countries working together (does Russia who sees warming as helpful comply).
4. Dealing With Inflation: The plan should address the inflation it causes, as it will raise living costs for people already struggling.
5. Better Use of Funds: Proving this use of funds is better than spending on other global issues.
TL;DR is three major factors:
1. The agencies that are doing the estimates are _very_ bad at exponential development curves (cough cough IEA estimating solar [2])
2. Unfortunately much of the developing world's economy is not growing as fast as we previously thought it would (similar thing happening with birthrates)
3. Many costs are absolute and _not_ marginal, which is just wrong IMO. We are going to need the energy either way, we should be talking about the "green premium" (as far as it exists), not how much it'll cost to generate XX TWH of energy
[1]: https://www.economist.com/interactive/briefing/2024/11/14/th...
[2]: https://www.economist.com/interactive/briefing/2024/11/14/th...
If you turn off your gas generator and replace it with solar + batteries, you will spend the entire cost of solar + batteries plus the decommissioning cost of gas (that may be negative if you can sell some parts) to go back to exactly the same point you were before.
So, no the cost is only marginal if you accept you will follow the depreciation curve of you infrastructure. And that's way too slow to reach the goal.
The linked article also mentions a way less aggressive timeline, which means there's less of "tear out existing equipment and replace with renewable" going on, which raises costs. Moreover, the argument isn't that there's no such costs, only that they're being overestimated.
Even if the ASHP lasted forever, required no maintenance ever, and you had to buy a new gas boiler every 10 years, it would literally never make economic sense even if there weren't $2500 incentives on the gas boiler, but the movement on electric rates is definitely in the wrong direction if one wishes to displace natural gas with electricity (even at 400% efficiency).
Every year that things stay like this is pushing back the likely time to next re-evaluation for that property by another 20 years.
Even for people who don’t have the space or capital to install their own solar, this will happen writ large as the US builds out utility scale solar, wind and storage.
I do hope that slate lookalike solar tiles become advisable and cost-effective as I’d be happy to pay a small premium to generate and store locally.
Solar aside, I am thinking about installing a battery system that time-shifts from low-rate times to high-rate times. It's almost cost effective now.
It doesnt give any indication about the level of debasement of currency to accomplish it to that scale, to pay for what? to whom?
and even if you identified some answers to those questions, this is where the disagreements are, ranging from cordial disagreement to outright denial of a problem
but most of it comes down to who is paying, for what, why are we paying, will it change anything, and how do we make a return on it
Trump just won an election in a very large part because -- and I quote -- "Prices are high!"
People were talking about gas prices, food prices, etc...
Any politician that would raise prices deliberately for any reason will be immediately voted out and replaced by literally anybody that doesn't do so, even someone like Trump.
The evidence for this should be fresh in your collective minds right now.
Likely Trump voters are about the least likely to be receptive to terms like "solidarity/class consciousness", and implying that they're rubes that can't think for themselves is the exact sort of rhetoric that caused the Democrats to lose the election.
And no, air pollution isn't just a problem in places like India and China, it kills over 100,000 Americans a year and costs society $886 billion. [2]
The evidence of anthropogenic global warming existing is extraordinarily strong [3] [4], but you're right, even if somehow 97% of climate scientists with studies published on the matter from 1991 to 2011 and 99% of them from 2012 to 2020 were wrong (in addition to NASA, The European Space Agency, NOAA, the World Meteorological Organization, and the national academy of science (or equivalent organization) of basically every country that has one), it'd still be worth avoiding millions of deaths a year and having established independent energy security.
1. https://www.bmj.com/content/383/bmj-2023-077784
2. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1816102116
I imagine if we were willing to spend 2 to 5% of global GDP on fighting climate change, we'd also be cutting those subsidies. So in that scenario we'd be reducing government deficits and reducing the rate at which we print money, not increasing it.
1. https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2023/08/24/fossil-fuel...
Large amounts of particulate in the air (for example from a volcano) would probably cause global cooling since it blocks out the sun.
For the most part, burning fossil fuels is leading to both air pollution and GHG emissions. Sometimes you can in theory choose an option that leads to less global warming than the status quo but is worse for human health (e.g. burning biomass for energy instead of natural gas, or using diesel instead of gasoline engines), but usually there's an another option where you can reduce both undesirable outcomes (wind, solar, hydro or nuclear energy, electric vehicles, etc.)
Even from an economic standpoint I can't think of too many scenarios where clean energy isn't the better option long-term. An EV will have a higher up-front cost but definitely will be cheaper than a diesel vehicle across it's lifetime, and most areas I imagine solar or wind would be cheaper than biomass. Freight ships are the only thing in 2024 where I think we don't have an option that's better in both regards and cheaper -- there we do have to choose between more global warming or more particulate matter harmful for human health. But I think that's the exception more than the rule for human activities.
1. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cleaned-up-shippi...
what is this reasoning? an invading army is coming, i won't try to stop it, let's just lie down and die. this focus on personal convenience combined with a lack of a will to live isn't just deadly, it's pathetic.
even if you fail, resisting against the darkness is one big part of what dignifies humanity.
Note that I'm not saying that we shouldn't reduce polution, or build more green energy. Nuclear, solar, wind - all of the above, please. Let's just not turn this into a religion about which you can't ask any questions for fear of being burned at the stake, and to which any sacrifice is worthwhile and you're a heretic if you suggest otherwise. Science must be questioned, otherwise it's not science.
Is that the cost for the duct tape needed to plug the airvents of data centers all over the world? The whole AI hype is driving energy consumption through the roof and when you see the companies behind the hype eye having their own nuclear power plants you know they are going to outscale cities housing millions in waste heat production.
> Estimated global data centre electricity consumption in 2022 was 240-340 TWh1, or around 1-1.3% of global final electricity demand. This excludes energy used for cryptocurrency mining, which was estimated to be around 110 TWh in 2022, accounting for 0.4% of annual global electricity demand.
You're hearing about the potential for a Gigwatt site, but a Gigwatt full out is less than 10 TWh per year (8960 hours/year). These things make the news, but they're pretty efficient electrically. The question is whether they have utility.
https://www.iea.org/energy-system/buildings/data-centres-and...
On the order of 100-200 trillion USD. Which is roughly 100-200% of global yearly GDP. Or 2-5% of yearly GDP until 2050. This could well be provided by printing money at all the federal reserve banks.
This investment will likely bring in a positive return on investment because it reduces the negative climate impacts.
Without such investments the downstream costs in climate change adaptation will be very expensive