Does Fiona Harvey at the UK Guardian see the idiocy of the headline and article?
The climate crisis will destroy our economies – we learned this 20 years ago. When will we act?
Saving the only planet we have makes good economic sense. There is, after all, no money to be made on a dead Earth. There may be costs involved now, but they are worth paying to protect our children from certain destruction.
These propositions seem self-evident now. But two decades ago, mainstream economists had very different ideas. They had proved that the climate crisis would be a mere economic blip, easily absorbed by growing economies and therefore not worth spending money on. In their accounting, they considered ice caps and glaciers functionally worthless, that trees only add to GDP when they are cut down, and that a livable climate shouldn’t even merit a line on a spreadsheet.
What changed? Twenty years ago this week an earth-shaking report was published by Nicholas Stern, a former World Bank chief economist turned adviser to Gordon Brown. His review, The Economics of Climate Change, upended conventional wisdom among economists and dragged them into a new century. It set out, for the first time, in clear and bold terms, why investing in a low-carbon future makes economic sense.
The Stern review, in 700 dense pages full of graphs and data, is a model of transformative thinking. Using standard economic tools and methods, and in ways that other mainstream economists could understand, Stern made three key, and at the time radical, conclusions: that the costs of inaction on the climate were greater than the costs of action; that the climate crisis was a market failure; and that economic growth was compatible with cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
And 20 years later economies are kinda doing the same thing they’ve been doing. Things get bad and things get good and things get OK. It’s cyclical, but, a small uptick in global temperatures since 1850 is not doomy. You know what’s worse? Governments trying to control economies for idiotic ideas like ‘climate change’, messing things up.
But Stern stuck to his analysis, and in the 20 years since it has been found sound – if anything, he underestimated both the rapidity of heating and economic consequences, and overestimated the cost of renewable energy. Stern’s work liberated many governments: they could now justify bold climate strategies to investors, aid donors and the ever-present bond markets. Conversely, laggard administrations could be challenged at the ballot box and, increasingly, in court.
The cost of energy has skyrocketed for essentially three reasons: way more people, more intensive use energy for our modern lifestyles, and not adding reliable, dependable, affordable energy sources to the grid. Instead, government has essentially done away with building more nuclear, natural gas, and coal fired plants in favor of solar and wind. Hell, they don’t even like hydrothermal, and tear electric generating dams down.
It might seem, in 2026, as if Stern has won the argument. But traditional economic approaches to the climate refuse to go away. In 2018, even after a deluge of science showing that 3C heating would leave coastal cities under water and swathes of agricultural land as desert, Nordhaus published a paper claiming that 3C would reduce global GDP by just 2.1%, and even a 6C increase would incur just 8.5% GDP loss. However, other climate scientists have indicated that at 6C widespread famine could leave billions of people, in economic terms, suboptimally productive. Or, as the rest of us might say, dead.
Yeah yeah yeah, always prognostications of the future.
Read: 20 Years Ago We Learned That Climate Doom Will Ruin Economies Or Something »
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