http://www.economist.com/agenda/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8100260&fsrc=nwl
"SIR NICHOLAS STERN, the head of the British Government Economic Service, has produced the world's first big report on the economics of climate change. But his 700-page effort, although stuffed with figures, is not really about economics. It is about politic,the politics of getting America to lead a global effort to mitigate the effects of climate change.
The purpose of Sir Nicholas's report,commissioned by Tony Blair,is to deal with the argument of people who accept that climate change is happening, but who say that trying to do anything about it would be a waste of money. This argument is heard occasionally in Europe and frequently in America, where, for added potency, it is combined with the notion that European attempts to tax carbon are part of a conspiracy by socialists determined to undermine the American way of life.
Sir Nicholas's argument is that, far from undermining the American way of life, attempts to mitigate climate change may help preserve it. He argues this by setting the costs of allowing climate change to happen against the costs of mitigating climate change.
Previous estimates of the costs of climate change,as a result of more hurricanes, more floods and rising sea levels, for instance,have been somewhere between nothing and 2% of global GDP. But Sir Nicholas says those figures were wrong, for two reasons. First, the science has changed, and global warming seems to be happening faster than was previously believed. Second, those estimates have looked only at the likeliest outcomes from climate change, not at the outlying catastrophic possibilities. As a result, Sir Nicholas maintains that if greenhouse gas emissions go on increasing at their present rate, global output is likely to be between 5% and 20% lower over the next two centuries than it otherwise would have been.
Compared with those figures, the costs of mitigating climate change look quite moderate. Sir Nicholas reckons that stabilising concentrations of greenhouse gas equivalent at 550 parts per million (ppm) is a reasonable objective (current levels are at around 380ppm). He reckons that, partly because of falling alternative energy costs, the world could achieve that at a moderate cost. Global output is likely to be around 1% lower by 2050 than it otherwise would have been.
The choice does not look like a difficult one: costs of 5%-20% of global GDP versus costs of 1% of global GDP. Unfortunately, that's not the difficult bit. The difficult bit is the politics. Climate change is an exceedingly hard issue. It is uncertain: nobody really knows how much it is going to cost. It crosses generations: this generation will have to bear some of the costs while the benefits will accrue to future generations. It crosses boundaries: no one country can solve the problem.
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Comment
Americans currently consume 25% of the world's resources and are doing everything they can to ensure nothing will be left for future generations.
Our political systems are geared to short time frames.
We are experiencing the opening rounds of a huge energy crisis and the only solution that two of our most powerful political economies have managed to come up with is to break some of the few and most fundamental and important international laws of national behaviour by circumventing the UN to pre-emptively attack Iraq to try to control one of world's largest remaining oil reserves.
According to Georgce Monbiot, we have to reduce our emissions by something like 60% across the planet, not merely slow down the continuing increase to single digits.
Who to trust ? George Monbiot or some high-rent bureaucrat , as Sir Nicholas Stern, who once worked for the nation-destroying, economy-crippling, environment-devastating World Bank?
What chance is there is that national governments can deliver the necessary efforts? They cannot begin to do this unless they are serious about providing and policing global schemes of tax allowance for the private sector which will demand that these corporations benefit financially from environmental stewardship and will be penalised by law if they don't comply.
More than 30 years ago, publications like the Club of Rome's "The Limits to Growth", were pointing out the non-sustainability of an ever-increasing population of technological empowered but essentially insatiable human apes (my words) on our finite and vulnerable planet, but instead of taking it seriously (admittedly, a huge challenge), we allowed ourselves to be led into "collective denial". Which is where we still are, now struggling both to and not to face up to the situation as the evidence for and consequences of global climate change (just one important aspect of the "Sustainability Problem") increasingly force themselves upon us.
Notwithstanding that a problem in which one is total immersed, familiar with and dependent upon is very difficult (for some, impossible) to recognise, there is no prospect of us solving the "Sustainability Problem", and thus saving the planet for our children and future generations, unless we recognise and face up to its root cause, for more about which, go to my website at http://www.spaceship-earth.org
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