extremely shortsighted thinking especially for a civil servant from a country which has the bulk of its population and investment on its coastlines.
i wonder what his stance on the now-annual wildfires are.
i wonder what his stance on the now-annual wildfires are.
We’ve always had issues with wild fires, economists will give 0 fucks anyway as Sydney, or Melboure is not burning.
As another example, dipshits like Nordhaus think Agriculture is unimportant as its only a small part of GDP. That eating is vital need seems to have escaped them.
https://theintercept.com/2023/10/29/william-nordhaus-climate-economics/
Ignorance of systems has its way of plowing forward, juggernaut-like. Nordhaus has opined that agriculture is “the part of the economy that is sensitive to climate change,” but because it accounts for just 3 percent of national output, climate disruption of food production cannot produce a “very large effect on the U.S. economy.” It is unfortunate for his calculations that agriculture is the foundation on which the other 97 percent of GDP depends. Without food — strange that one needs to reiterate this — there is no economy, no society, no civilization. Yet Nordhaus treats agriculture as indifferently fungible.
There is a flaw when measuring GDP impacts of energy. The more expensive the energy, the higher the GDP including higher costs of goods and transportation costs and heating. With this measure, you can boost GDP by boosting extortion power with 0 new investment. Just higher energy prices.
The economic value of energy is best measure in mwh “to the tire”, ie after waste energy. The lower the price, the better economic value for consumers which includes manufacturing and other commerce. Jobs come from investment and energy expansion. When clean energy replaces climate terrorism, jobs are created even as climate terrorist revenues and profits fall. There are widespread gains even as privatized losses occur.
The costs of climate change can be separated between widely insured jurisdictions and uninsured developing world. Either way, property values are diminished by drought (farming value especially), and intense wind/flooding storms. We can place an economic cost on deaths caused. In developing world, emigration north becomes a reaction to losing everything and hopelessness.
In developed world, an insurance crisis and associated property devaluation can lead to a leveraged banking crisis. Where rebuilding in a spot is a dumb idea, banking losses follow, even as inland property becomes more desirable. Intense rain events in inland areas (Hurricane Helene as one example, but many areas are being impacted by extreme rain events unrelated to hurricanes) still creates an insurance crisis, as every year seems to spawn a 500 year event somewhere, and 2024 had several such events globally.
These are current unfolding crisis of global warming that will get incrementally worse each year/decade. The risk of Greenland/Antarctica led sea rise, and the march forward towards those events are not good for property values either, as is continued heating of oceans/land to bring more intense storms and droughts.
Technological expenses for surviving are a solution, but still a cost: Indoor farming, lab meat, AC, rebuilding homes on stilts.
War, starvation, genocide is another path to bring high profit from global warming to a select few. If war is needed, then surely those human sustainability hippies can be ignored while we do the important genocide, use up more oil in the process, and sanction the oil from our war opponents so that our friends (for now) can drill for more.
Caring about global warming, and its enormous costs, is only a luxury when you don’t have more important concerns than human sustainability. It is extremely easy to make you have more important concerns.
