Climate Change is Expensive, But That’s Not the Point
Why would we calculate how many dollars the planet’s worth?
At the end of 2004, soon after President George W. Bush’s election to a second term, I was writing a final article for my journalism degree with a concentration in International and Security Issues.
A lot of our class discussion had been about Bush’s invasion of Iraq, which started several months before my first semester of the program. I had been personally opposed to war in Iraq. The U.S. administration never accused Saddam Hussein of planning the 9/11 attack; instead, they said he had weapons of mass destruction. (Eventually they admitted he’d never had the weapons they were looking for and they’d waged war on a false pretext.) Apart from the ethics of killing people, I sided with the pessimists who thought war in Iraq would cost “a trillion dollars” and last many years, a suggestion which my advisor considered ridiculous and not even worthy of engagement. (Ultimately, it cost the US $2 trillion.)
For my final project, I wanted to write about climate change. I wanted to say: You think terrorist attacks are expensive? Yes, they are—so what do you think we’ll pay in taxes and insurance premiums if we destroy the whole planet?
