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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 | 1 comments | 17 Nov 24 18:49 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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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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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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1. 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