Essay by Eric Worrall
The preservation of civilisation is all yours, for the bargain price of US $196 trillion (AU $300 trillion).
$300 trillion is needed to stop global warming, and that’s a bargain
Mark Gongloff
July 6, 2023 — 8.45amWhat price tag would you put on preserving a functioning human civilisation? Would $300 trillion just about cover it? Could that even be a bargain?
Bloomberg’s green-energy research team, BNEF, estimates in a new report this week it could cost $US196 trillion ($295 trillion) in investments to zero out the world’s carbon emissions by 2050, as many countries have pledged to do, to avoid society-destroying global warming.
It probably won’t shock you to learn the world’s net-zero pledges haven’t yet been followed by the hard cash, or even promises of hard cash, necessary to make them a reality.
…
As shockingly large as these numbers may seem, they are minimal compared with the likely price tag for doing nothing. Insurance giant Swiss Re has estimated that runaway global warming could gouge $US23 trillion per year from global GDP, with developed economies possibly 10 per cent smaller than they should be in a cooler world. By such measures, spending $US200 trillion over 27 years sounds relatively cheap.
…
The Swiss Re estimate of $23 trillion per year;
Climate change: The real costs to Asia Pacific
23 Apr 2021
…
Under the most negative ‘business as usual’ scenario, climate change will cost Asia more than a quarter (26.5%) of GDP by 2050. That’s the highest regional toll after the Middle East and Africa (27.6%).
Emerging Asia will bear the brunt of climate change impacts. Due to a combination of geography and lack of adaptive capacity such as climate mitigation infrastructure, markets like Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines rank on the low end of the Index, while economies such as Japan, Australia, Hong Kong, Korea and Singapore score relatively well.
However, the research demonstrates conclusively that there are no winners in a world of rising temperatures. In a most severe scenario Japan would lose 12% of GDP by mid-century, and Singapore 46.4% – roughly the same proportion as its less prosperous Southeast Asian neighbours.
…
Read more: https://www.swissre.com/risk-knowledge/risk-perspectives-blog/climate-change-cost-asia-pacific.html
What can I say?
To put these numbers into perspective, back in the 1950s Manhattan scientists discovered a means of building a manned starship using 1950s technology (search the link for “momentum limited”). The starship could have reached a top speed of 3.3% of the speed of light – just over a human lifetime to reach the nearest star. The estimated cost of one of these starships was 10% of the USA’s annual GDP – around $2.3 trillion in today’s dollars.
With $300 trillion, We could build 130 of these starships and start colonising our corner of the galaxy.
Don’t forget folks, renewable energy is still cheaper than coal. Do I need a /sarc tag?