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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?
This Was a Large Scope
Fully making the point would have involved putting a dollar value on the planet, which, I realized, was inherently satirical, and also difficult. Satire is difficult. Coming up with a “credible” or “realistic” number, even to use it for illustration, exceeded my capabilities as a student. I think it would exceed just about anyone’s imaginative capabilities because it requires us to ask meta questions about what money is and how it is counted, as well as to make predictions about ecological catastrophes and human responses to them.
The number is elusive, but the Tyndall Centre did it in a 2018 report (PDF). The Tyndall Centre said, as Felix Salmon put it for Axios, “a 2.0°C increase will cause $69 trillion of damage, and a 3.7°C increase will cause a stunning $551 trillion in damage.” Salmon pointed out: “$551 trillion is more than all the wealth currently existing in the world, which gives an indication of just how much richer humanity could become…
