Humans have caused 1.5 °C of long-term global warming according to new estimates

Looking into the numbers a couple if months ago I was surprised how little it costs to stop climate change.

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

Printing money wouldn't work - you just make all of the existing money less valuable.

That doesn't mean the new money doesn't have value, just has a small percentage less value. It's a wealth transfer from people who currently have money to the new money. It works out well for people who have a negative net worth, as well!

It actually would even if it made existing money less valuable. Econ 101

> investment will likely bring in a positive return on investment because it reduces the negative climate impacts

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.

Ever heard of quantitative easing?

Yeah, the salaried folk who find out in hindsight will be really happy as well. /s

And the question is, then, what if you spend all those trillions (which we don't have, BTW), and it doesn't "stop". Who's going to be responsible, and in what way?

There is also a good case to be made that the prices being bandied around are actually much too high [1]

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...

> I was surprised how little it costs to stop climate change.

If you read Drawdown, you'll see that it doesn't cost money to stop climate change, it saves money.

https://drawdown.org/the-book

Then we'll only have just eliminated air pollution that kills millions of people per year and established independent energy security

If you're referring to he economist one, I've read it too, and I think it would be much cheaper.

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.

Worst part is 10x this money in real terms will be printed anyway and spent for exactly this purpose in the future, just way too late.

There's a plutocratic incentive to blame plutocratic problems on demographics. It fits neatly into their divide and conquer strategy.

That's why mass media is so keen to blame everything on your mom ("boomers"), along with immigrants, robots, woke mind viruses, etc.

It is a wealth transfer from people who currently have cash and earn cash (workers, since increases in pay lag the rate at which currency loses purchasing power) to people who have assets and COLA adjusted annuities (wealthy people and old people).

Only 1% of GDP is agriculture, yet 100% of society relies on agriculture for survival. Because we don't have food shortages right now, GDP is heavily slanted towards things that don't really matter. You can't take that sort of monopoly money and try to influence the real world, if it were that easy then governments would be changing gas prices to win elections a lot more effectively.

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.

It wouldn't work linearly, but it still works. If you print 10% of your GDP in a year, you'll be sitting on only 1/11th of the GDP in cash at the end of the process.

Look at Covid fiscal response causing permanent 30% inflation in the last 4 years. The climate+demographic response money printing operation will be way bigger than that.

You are essentially forced borrowing from the cash holders of the printed currency. So yeah it would work. Wouldn’t necessarily be fair or popular; but it would work. Just have to account for the new money also being worth less because of the increase in the denominator of this equation.

> To cut emissions, we need to kill materialism, consumption economy

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.

ah the ever popular call to inaction as though inaction isn't a very dangerous course of action

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.

I don’t like that we’re even talking about money in this context. Money is almost fake, it’s right there in the ‘fiat’ name, yet that’s all most people care about.

That is not how money and "work" functions. There is no way to "spend money" without spending energy and emitting CO2.

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.

"Let them eat Credit Default Swaps."

> I was surprised how little it costs to stop climate change.

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.

Most of those not alive in 2050 will have children and grandchildren whom they expect to be alive by then.

There's no immediate bottleneck for reducing fossil fuel consumption. More money will translate into more effect, at most delayed by some half of a decade for any foreseeable effort.

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).

2% of the GDP is technically massive, but really, fuck anybody that wants to throw the future generations under the bus to save that.

And no, I won't be around by 2050.

> Looking into the numbers a couple if months ago I was surprised how little it costs to stop climate change.

Do you account for unpredictable, but climate changing, events like solar flare activity and volcanic activity, which also can contribute?

While people are excited about AI and datacenter use, it's still tiny in comparison to global energy consumption (1-2%) though that excludes all the crypto folks who are another 100 TWh per year or so:

> 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...

Pricing in externalities is probably the only way we can solve carbon emissions, and would still be very difficult. We would need global participation, otherwise carbon emissions can just be outsourced to other countries. Also, we need to decide the price of emitting carbon. Perhaps survey economists from every country and aggregate the answers somehow.

> Many costs are absolute and _not_ marginal

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.

Lucky the Earth is infinite and so perpetual growth will work. /s

Standard of living and human development index is a better metric to measure how well a society is doing than money.

how do you spend it?

The price of renewables has plunged to be cheaper than fossil fuels, battery tech is improving while prices are dropping, new jobs are created, etc, etc.

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.

Of course stopping climate change will save in the long run. The critical question is who should spend the money now to save money later. That is the crux of the free rider problem.

It's a strawman to say that money is fake because no serious economist argues that money is "real". Of course it is fake. We use money because it's a useful way to organize society

Air pollution and CO2 emissions are different things. One causes cancer and heart issues, the other causes global warming.

Large amounts of particulate in the air (for example from a volcano) would probably cause global cooling since it blocks out the sun.

About half of CO2 emissions are electricity, heating and transport. Not beef.

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.

I recall the numbers are about reducing the man-made emissions to net-zero by 2050. I believe this must include some measures which counteract emissions which can't be reduced.

Money isn't fake, it's a useful abstraction for describing the allocation of goods and services. We could describe the cost of transitioning from fossil fuels in terms of labor hours spent, miles not traveled in an ICE vehicle, tons of lithium mined, etc. But money lets us collapse all of that down into one number that we can get our heads around and which is useful for figuring out things like how much we need to raise taxes

What are you talking about? If you take 2.5% to spend it on better infrastructure and existing technologies (that are more environmentally friendly) and develop new technologies, you are not reducing GDP. GDP just measures the ammount of money a country spends.

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.

Right, fossil fuels cause around 8 million deaths a year from air pollution [1], so regardless of climate change it'd be worth making a dent in those numbers.

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

3. https://dx.doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/8/2/024024

4. https://doi.org/10.1088%2F1748-9326%2Fac2966

I fear you're an optimist.

My point is you need a society to use it and climate change will cause events which will make people question whether we still have one - which is enough for money to stop being useful. People in the west take a lot for granted.

The CO2 intensity of any activity can be vastly different. Net-Zero goals require that you transition to activities which produce less CO2. This can be negative CO2 emmissions (e.g. planting trees/felling them/storing the wood).

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.

I would be if I said it’ll work… at that point there won’t be anything to lose so might as well print.

Growth doesn’t have to depend on finite resources. Growth is simply more value being exchanged. You can have sustainable growth.

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.

Most of the inflation from the last 4 years is attributable to Russia invading Ukraine. You can't have the largest natural gas exporter and second largest oil exporter invade one of the largest grain exporters without causing basically everything in a supermarket or restaurant to be more expensive.

Just because it is not solid, does not mean it is not real.

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.

I understand your point and I have also long held the point of view, but have recently learned that this isn't the right framing. You - as a citizen - don't need to reduce your consumption, but we as a society must manage that all activities are priced properly.

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.

Yeah that sounds right, I'm just wondering where the materials and the labor come from. We don't just have 5% of GDP worth of those laying around, they're currently allocated to other things. Not saying it's impossible, but it's hard to estimate the repercussions.

This is about spending to replace CO2 emitting technologies in electricity production, transport and housing to net-zero sources.

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.

Did you miss the part where the OP was proposing to basically rob the poor by inflating the currency? The poor and lower middle class already barely make ends meet even in the US, let alone the rest of the world. Plus, nobody can guarantee that the warming will stop. There have been periods in Earth's past when it was almost twice as hot as it is today. There have been periods when greenhouse gases (CO2 specifically, Ordovician period, 500M years ago) were _six times_ what they are today. Earth is still not Venus-like. Explain that one to me. Perhaps there are parts to this that we do not understand, and it might be premature to sacrifice the world economy and the livelihoods of the bottom 90% by income on this altar?

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.

Although a useful metric about the size of economy, I dont think this gives any metric of the level of liquidity, or size of investment, or austerity measure necessary to change it

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

We have some crazy incentives to install new gas boilers in MA. I very specifically wanted to switch from gas to an air source heat pump and found there was only one company in the area who was willing to quote it (alongside their own, much cheaper, quote for a gas combi boiler) and their quote was outrageously non-competitive with local fossil fuel burning (in large part because our electricity is around $0.30/kWh, but also because they were the only supplier and even they didn't really want to do the work).

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.

A new energy source is not like a new technology that can be developed. It needs to be discovered - as in a scientific break-through. A plan can not assume that break-throughs occur.

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.

The CO2 concentrations we’re approaching also cause cognitive impairment

What you're saying is correct, but I can't think of many scenarios where it's relevant to human actions in the present, with the exception of freight ships' sulfur emissions. [1]

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...

> materials and the labor come from. We don't just have 5% of GDP worth of those laying around

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?

> About half of CO2 emissions are electricity, heating and transport. Not beef.

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

The amount of CO2 yet to be released depends on the amount of fossil fuel yet to be extracted. Current oil discoveries, wells, and coal mines will all be exploited as long as they are profitable.

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.

> You - as a citizen - don't need to reduce your consumption, but we as a society must manage that all activities are priced properly.

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.

Oh, certainly, if we are to make a serious effort, it requires dealocating a bit of resources from other areas.

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.

Also shipping interruptions and lockdowns. Giving people money to not work is goin to have a much larger inflationary effect than giving people money to build things we want.

Would spending 100 trillion dollars that we don't have cause more deaths than it prevents, due to increased poverty and rising cost of living? That's all I'm really asking here. Has anyone bothered to run the numbers?

This is a fantasy.

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.

Source? America is a natural gas exporter.

Most people in the world do not eat that much beef. Some countries are outliers.

"Prices are high!" came with both a lack of counter narrative from the Democratic candidate AND a scapegoated narrative that blames the government and migrants for the prices. If you give the masses a narrative they'll buy in. All you need to do is provide a meaningful narrative that accurately describes the situation and builds solidarity/class consciousness.

Replacing CO₂-emitting technologies is already happening. To argue for this plan would require proving at least the following:

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.

> What we eat, by far, is the element that most impacts the planet. By far.

No it isn‘t.

Even in disaster scenarios like hurricanes, where everyone is going to do nearly everything they can regardless of cost to survive, money is still used in practice and in discussions, evaluations, planning. In a practical sense money is real not fake, because what money is used for, limited resources, is real not fake.

> Hell a single cotton shirt requires 2000 liters of fresh water

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.

>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.

> Most of the inflation from the last 4 years is attributable to Russia invading Ukraine

Source? Other than media articles repeating "due to the war in Ukraine"

Assuming you are talking about the USA, supposedly the USA is a net /exporter/ of grains [0]

[0] Not loading for me but https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic... . Copilot said "The United States is a net grain exporter. According to the USDA Economic Research Service (ERS), the U.S. typically exports more agricultural goods, including grains, than it imports1. In fiscal year 2023, the value of U.S. agricultural exports was $178.7 billion, despite a decline from the previous year. Grains and feeds are among the leading U.S. agricultural exports"

>and builds solidarity/class consciousness.

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.

"...2-5% of yearly GDP until 2050"

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.

Those studies are... questionable, considering that US submarines have an order of magnitude higher concentration and the sailors on board don't turn into drooling idiots.

https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/11170/chapter/5

There's a big difference between printing money to trick people into continuing to buy stuff while production is halted during a pandemic and massive investments in new energy sources and technology development and deployment.

In this context money is just a unit of measurement. If we say that we need more of a particular kind of infrastructure and reduce a particular kind of activity, etc, then the discussion requires being able to say how much of those (many!) things and we can quantify all of those in terms of dollars.

Any large expenditure is going to cause inflation since it competes with the rest of market for materials, labor, or any other limited resource. It doesn't mean we shouldn't do it but we can't just ignore the consequences.

Subsidies for oil, coal and natural gas currently cost us about 7.1% of global GDP. [1]

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...

The price of home solar and batteries is dropping to the point that $0.30/kWh is becoming untenable in any home that has a decent amount of roof space. You’re better off financing a rooftop solar plant and buying 3-4 days of storage, even if you remain tied to the grid. Insofar as those costs are being driven by generation, the declining price of solar should eventually place an upper bound on what people will pay for electricity. Even if you don’t live in a sunny place and even if net metering pays $0, with a few days of storage you can reduce your grid consumption to the point where your actual need to consume expensive electricity becomes a tiny fraction of your overall usage. I think this will tend to push costs downwards.

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 agree on ending the subsidies, that's fine. But the US alone spends over $2T more each year than it earns. Oil/gas subsidies in the US are a tiny fraction of that sum.

> The price of renewables has plunged to be cheaper than fossil fuels

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.

Paraphrasing your own metaphor, we can all eat 1 quality burger or steak once a week (or fortnight), cycling or at least driving a BEV to the restaurant and we would be well within sustainable limits

We can grow indefinitely if we entertain ourselves with more advanced and efficient technologies.

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

Assets and cola adjusted annuities also lag. They may lag less, but that's a discussion to have.

Real median wages have gone up more than inflation has over the last few years. It's just not evenly distributed.

I don't think sarcastic comments really help, people who aren't capable of having real conversations about this already bring enough of that. It is definitely worth talking openly about whether it's worth trading short term inflationary pain for long-term climate pain.

The (vast) majority of labor on this planet is underutilized and there’s plenty of material still left in the ground if there was demand to extract it. There are two billion people living on subsistence farming alone whose labor could be unlocked by raising them out of poverty and feeding them via mechanized agriculture. Then there’s the massive logistics of modern militaries that could be retooled towards climate change diplomacy.

Unfortunately it’s all part of the same tragedy of the commons and coordination problem.

> We would need global participation, otherwise carbon emissions can just be outsourced to other countries

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.

> 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...

How would you determine how much carbon was used throughout the entire supply chain of an imported product? If the product is produced domestically, the government can enforce every business to measure its carbon emissions, but cannot do the same for imported products

It's not a small amount of water by any means and it's just one of the various polluting factors in its production. The average young american buys an average 10 shirts per year and this number keeps increasing.

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.

Unfortunately, we have a 100 year old slate roof, which makes solar some mix of difficult, expensive, or not advised. At the exact moment of maximum heat demand (both seasonally and time of day), solar generation is at its lowest.

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.

> I'm just wondering where the materials and the labor come from. We don't just have 5% of GDP worth of those laying around

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.

GDP is a number without lot of meaning. Better thing to compare is the percentage of tax revenue. Total tax revenue of the world is $14.8T. So you need more than 30% relative increase in taxation.

No. The energy consumption does not need to decrease, the source must be more eficient. We have nuclear energy, despite the propaganda, nuclear energy (specially the Thorium reactors) produce very little waste and pollute less than fosil fuels or even solar panels. You do not need to discover a new source of energy to stop climate change. The problem is that people keep thinking in how much it will cost.

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.

First hit on google: https://gasoutlook.com/analysis/u-s-renewable-energy-beats-f....

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.

Keep in mind that most countries subsidise fossil fuels so that energy and transportation remains cheap and drives the economy — or at least that's the logic I hear, idk if it actually works that way

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

I think that last sentence captures the whole reason we're having this discussion

I guess you're right. The parent speaks of inflation as if printing money is the new norm. If you are going to take money from your citizens then be upfront about it!

All the money we have was printed. Printing money has always been the norm, it's just a matter of how much - at what rate.

I sympathize. We can't install solar either because of roof pitch and trees. I think my overall point is that if many customers can install solar and bypass expensive generation, this will tend to put a downwards pressure on generation prices in the long term.

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.

When the prices of fungible products rise in one place, they rise everywhere, otherwise there would be arbitrage opportunities everywhere.

Those are very weirdly specific examples that don't destroy much real resources at all. What resources does a casino pit boss destroy but time? And surely Prada has one of the smallest resources to money spent ratios you could imagine? Half a calf's worth of leather for a $10k bag?

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.

From your link:

> 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.

You can print but still have a cap, see Bitcoin.

We do have a cap. It's not even clear to me that the federal government prints more slowly than bitcoin as a percentage of issued currency.