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

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399 points gmays | 7 comments | 17 Nov 24 18:49 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom
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oezi ◴[17 Nov 24 19:06 UTC] No.42166179[source]▶
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

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Panino ◴[17 Nov 24 19:17 UTC] No.42166281[source]▶
> 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

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1. baq ◴[17 Nov 24 19:27 UTC] No.42166369[source]▶
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.
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2. spencerchubb ◴[17 Nov 24 19:47 UTC] No.42166552[source]▶
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
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3. derektank ◴[17 Nov 24 19:49 UTC] No.42166569[source]▶
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
4. baq ◴[17 Nov 24 19:54 UTC] No.42166607[source]▶
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.
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5. lukan ◴[17 Nov 24 20:01 UTC] No.42166666[source]▶
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.

6. therealdrag0 ◴[17 Nov 24 21:05 UTC] No.42167245{3}[source]▶
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.
7. PeterisP ◴[17 Nov 24 21:30 UTC] No.42167479[source]▶
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.