By Thomas Neuburger
Earlier this year, climate author Genevieve Guenther wrote about global warming and economics in The New Republic. There she said this:
Later this century, sometime toward my teenage son’s late middle age, climate change might torch 50 percent of the world’s gross domestic product. I’ll say that again. Sometime around 2070–2090, climate change could be doing so much damage to ecological and human systems, and the links between them, that the global economy could contract by half. (For comparison: The U.S. economy shrank by roughly 30 percent in the Great Depression.)
This is an under-discussed problem for sure, but with all respect to Ms. Guenther, though she's right in all else, I think her estimate is generous, even comforting. Consider:
• What’s the cost to world GNP when civilization rolls all the way back — from AI to electronics back to simple electricity (the world of the '50s); then to simple machines, like levers and pulleys, then back to oxen and slaves; and finally to where we began, hunting and tribes? What's "world GDP" at that point?
• Collapse happens fast. Once chaos starts, it won’t stop, and economic activity during a dying grinds to a halt. It’s almost a relief to think we have 35 years before collapses begin. What if we have just fifteen?
If half of the earth goes feral by 2060 — imagine life in India, south Asia and Africa under permanent famine and drought — what does the rest of the world look like? Business as usual? Or something a lot more disordered?
People keep using the cost of climate control as a reason to delay. The cost of not doing anything, is everything. Just a thought.
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