The Last Frost

According to Wikipedia, Sir Nicholas Stern "was the Chief Economist and Senior Vice-President of the World Bank from 2000 to 2003, and is now a civil servant and government economic advisor in the United Kingdom." He has also just released a 700 page report on the urgency of our climate change problem. He has made some, well, stern calls for immediate action; less we miss our window of opportunity and suffer the consequences.

Despite the dire situation he lays out, he also says, "we have the ability and technology to tackle climate change and that doing so will not only save the planet but also provide us with economic opportunities." I could not agree with him more.

He also estimates in his report that the cost of inaction on this problem could be as high as $9 trillion, that's $9,000 billion, both are inconceivable numbers.  That's costlier than both world wars and the great depression combined… ouch. [News.com.au]

His solution is spend 1% of the international GDP every year to drastically reduce greenhouse gas output. That's about $500 billion dollars a year. To give you a comparison, the war in Iraq cost the US alone roughly $338 billion to date, and that number will surely get higher. That also doesn't take into account the new economic opportunities that will arise from the new energy system. 

$9,000 billion climate change cost »  [News.com.au]

and 

Stern warning to save the planet » The Herald

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 1st, 2006 at 9:36 am and is filed under Climate Change, Economics, Oh Shit, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.