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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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tinco ◴[17 Nov 24 19:19 UTC] No.42166311[source]▶
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.

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marcosdumay ◴[17 Nov 24 19:36 UTC] No.42166442[source]▶
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).

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tinco ◴[17 Nov 24 20:04 UTC] No.42166691[source]▶
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.
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1. throwup238 ◴[17 Nov 24 23:27 UTC] No.42168283{3}[source]▶
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.