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399 points gmays | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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oezi ◴[] 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 ◴[] 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 ◴[] 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 ◴[] 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. consteval ◴[] No.42169095{3}[source]
> 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.