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New Report Urges Quick, Aggressive Action to Stem Carbon Emissions
A group of economists have come up with a simple formula for climate stabilization: Pay now, or pay a whole lot more later.
The
sound way to deal with the threats of climate change is to spend the
money now to rapidly convert the world to carbon-free energy, according
to a report that debunks claims that acting quickly will destroy the
world economy. 
"The Economics of 350" looks at the benefits and costs of climate action. The report arrives as world leaders prepare for the United Nations summit on climate change this December in Copenhagen, as the U.S. Congress grapples with bills to reduce greenhouse emissions and as a grassroots movement -- 350.org -- gains momentum toward its Oct. 24 International Day of Climate Action.
The report was released this week by Economics for Equity and the Environment, a network of 200 economists that is a project of Portland-based Ecotrust.
Impetus for the report, the biggest project by the network, grew as more world leaders accepted 350 parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere as the limit for the planet's health -- the Earth's carbon budget. Emissions are at about 385 parts per million now.
"As the news keeps sounding worse and worse, what we're talking about is not that the cost of doing something has changed -- the cost of doing nothing is really what's escalating," said Frank Ackerman, of the Stockholm Environment Institute at Tufts University.
The economists estimated a cost of about 2.5 percent of the gross world product would be needed to begin transforming the way we live and work in the world. Such a radical action could create jobs, they said, and could hurry technological advances -- much like the Cold War did in the 1950s and 1960s.
"It does not mean stopping growth," Ackerman said. "It does not mean living in caves.
"The Cold War spending jumpstarted technology -- really transformed our lives now," he said. "Nobody looks back at that and says it was a bad deal because our grandparents had less to spend at the department store because they were paying a few extra on taxes."
Delaying or taking smaller steps against carbon emissions risks even greater financial and human costs as temperatures rise, ice sheets melt and ecosystems die, the reports says.
Its authors hope the report will get wide readership.
"We need people on the ground to convey to lawmakers that this is the price they're willing to pay, that they've seen the future and the future scares them," said Kristen Sheeran, director of Economics for Equity and the Environment and co-founder, with Ackerman, of RealClimateEconomics.org.
"We aren't going to get there by small actions," she said. "We aren't going to get there by turning out the light and walking to work a few days a week."
- Posted in
21 Comments so far
Show All2.5% of GDP could easily be raised by increasing marginal tax rates on the $100-millionaires alone, back to what rates were in the Reagan era.
This article celebrates the cold war spending.
It doesn't mention the carbon pollution of WAR or the fact that money borrowed to pay for war is money that can't be used to take this supposed Quick action.
This ain't the 50's when the US was a growing manufacturing country when the dollar was the new reserve currency of the world with a small fraction of the National Debt we now have.
This does not move me.... War is why we don't have what this article is trying to produce.
Not many things are simple but If we want to cut the carbon and more, like have a decent future... it is Peace or Bust.
Oh, I see this report was written by a group of economists... that explains it.
I agree. Anyone serious about reducing carbon can't overlook the world's largest single producer, the Pentagon. I've never heard anyone try and calculate the carbon footprint of Shock and Awe or the bombing of Afghanistan. There is the carbon costs of our wanting to control oil pipelines in Central Asia and China wanting to control oil in Africa, etc. Beyond the hardware of war, there are other costs like the cost of Venezuela or Cuba shipping their oil around the world to China because we can't get along with them. According to some theories of carbon reduction, even Iran should get credit for wanting to build nuclear plants, but no not them. Billions more will go to Pakistan even though no one seems to know what happened to the last $11 Billion - money that could be spent on something green besides Swiss bank accounts.
The author: "We aren't going to get there by small actions," she said. "We aren't going to get there by turning out the light and walking to work a few days a week."
I ask, how can we overlook that war with Iran will wipe out all our efforts of years within a few days or weeks? The carbon footprint of attacking Iran may seem trivial against the cost in lives, but IF global warming is a planetary challenge to our survival, how can we not talk about the global defense industry - of which we dwarf the rest of the world - as a major contributor? Nothing would be greener than peace. If our government isn't putting that on its famous Table, I doubt their sincerity.
Or, as you said:
"Not many things are simple but If we want to cut the carbon and more, like have a decent future... it is Peace or Bust."
The climate targets currently proposed by Washington are "unbearably weak", in the words of 350.org's Bill McKibben. They're far behind targets that the IPCC says would give us a 50:50 chance of avoiding disaster.
Tell President Obama and your senators to support a 40% emissions reduction by 2020 to avert crisis:
http://bit.ly/40by20
What are you going to tell your grandchildren when civilization begins to disintegrate...that the cost to reduce carbon emissions was too high?
The article leaves me confused...
"...accepted 350 parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere as the limit for the planet's health -- the Earth's carbon budget. Emissions are at about 385 parts per million now."
One term is a concentration of the whole, the other is a concentration of an emission rate. From the article the current concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has no coorelation with "emissions", the article doesn't tell me what the current atmosheric concentration is or how that equates with current continued "emissions" rate...
Am I missing something or did the Report?
The reporter "misspoke" or whatever the correct phrase would be for the written word.
Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration is 385 parts per million (actually slightly higher now, 387 ppm).
The global warming trend that peaked in 1998 and 2005 seems to have leveled off. Although sunspots, which correlate with warming, have remained unusually low in number, one can only speculate that if they rise to the expected number in the next year or two, it will make a substantial difference in global temperature.
Worldwide greenhouse gas emissions continue apace, and the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere goes higher and higher. It would seem that the global temperature should rise, even with the low sunspot activity, if human activity is causing significant warming. It's time to start asking if the imminent disaster isn't less imminent than previously thought.
Following the recommendations of the economists means betting that putting resources into reduction of greenhouse gases makes more sense than devoting the resources to improving responses to hurricanes, floods, and droughts, and making other changes to adapt to the warming that occurred over the last 100 or so years, and fighting pollution. I think before acting as if a climate disaster were imminent, we need more evidence that the current stasis will end in the next couple of years.
Your uncertainty is matched by many people in this country. Not many in other countries, where people listen to scientists for scientific information, rather than to institutions like Fox network, but what can you do? Let me re-cap:
Despite the meteoric rise of CO2 in the last century, and despite the fact that it is now higher than it has ever been, and despite the fact that we know that co2 is a significant factor in global climate change, and despite the fact that there is NO scientific argument about the concept that human behavior is contributing to that increase in atmospheric CO2, we still do not have to do anything because it isn't our fault. Right.
May I suggest something? Who f&^%$#g cares whose fault it is? It is take action now or watch your children and grandchildren die. Not in the next century. Not even in a half century. Soon. Very goddamn soon.
Wake up.
MichaelC
manning120 -- You can face facts or you can fill your head with crap and delude yourself that you know what you are talking about.
The thing about using a few years to skew the evidence has been widely debunked. It is a dishonest way of looking at the evidence which is meaningful in a wider range. Why don't you take the last year or last month and draw some conclusions as long as *you* are deciding what is relevant and what to discard?
Here's a graph. Which looks like the warming culprit, sunspots or CO2?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Temp-sunspot-co2.svg
Arry (October 6th, 2009 9:15 pm) -- Thanks for the link. Thank God for Wikipedia.
I don't disagree that temperatures have been rising over the last 100 years, although there have been decades when the average was down. It's what happened since 2005 that caught my attention. If the imminent disaster hypothesis is correct, the temperature curve in the last four years should look like the curve from around 1910 to 1940, especially with CO2 rising much faster than it did in from 1910 to 1940.
There has been considerable argument about the cause-effect relationship between temperature and CO2. It seems self-evident, if only from experience with soft drinks, that warmer oceans will release CO2, so that increased CO2 could be an effect. Of course, many other things are going on.
The graph shows the leveling off of temperature at the very end. With CO2 going up so radically (although the total amount in the atmosphere is still small), the leveling contradicts the theory that CO2 directly correlates. The correlation of temperature and sunspots looks closer than that between temperature and CO2. Doesn't this justify some doubt that CO2 is a major driver of warming? And the graph doesn't answer the question of how much of the rise in CO2 is really anthropogenic (how do you explain the leveling off in CO2 around WWII?), nor the question of whether humans can reasonably put a stop to it, or reverse it, even if all of it is anthropogenic.
Note that in the WWII period already mentioned, CO2 didn't increase, sunspots were more numerous, and yet temperature dropped significantly. Also interesting is that the biggest temperature drop occurred from the late 1870's to around 1910, although CO2 continued to rise during that time, and sunspots were only slightly fewer.
In my opinion, all of this supports my assertion that the imminent catastrophe may not be as imminent as we thought.
None of what you said is true (or is irrelevant in the larger context which is of primary significance and to which you appear to be blind) including your description of the graph, and you are ignoring my primary point about using short time spans to skew the evidence. (I can certainly go far beyond wikipedia, but it looks like you are unable to evaluate evidence, even to the point of seeing what's not there, so what's the use?) It may seem OK to you to cherry-pick, but that's not good enough. You're still blatantly doing it with no explanation whatever. For that reason, there is no reason anyone should take you seriously.
(You should also realize that you haven't made a big discovery about a very short plateau in the temperatures; but, for some reason, you haven't looked into the most likely explanations. Are you afraid of real science? Check www.realclimate.org , or would you prefer to stay ignorant?)
Arry October 7th, 2009 7:07 pm -- You misread my post. The importance of the graph lies in the last few years and in comparisons of those years with earlier ones, as discussed.
Nonetheless, I've saved the web site you provided and will study it when I have time.
Of course, you probably won't read this comment after so long. Thanks anyway.
"We aren't going to get there by small actions,"
We need a Monty Python Holy Grail moment---
When the bobbys arrive and pack Arthur and the (business)round table off to the looney bin.
There's really no time for anything else. The seismic activity in Asia is the beginning of the cascade (only my opinion...if correct, look for another large quake there inside four weeks from now). We can maybe keep the event within historical limits if we bust our footprint down below 350 as Hansen, McK and the boys say.
New Game. New Rules.
Small things do add up. They help.
Bi
cycle
Obama is too busy stuffing the coffers of the wealthy, ensuring they'll be set for life when the rest of the world dumps the soon to be worthless dollar. The world is sick of Washington's strong arming everyone's economy, and Wall St. knows it. That's why Obama's got Wall Street's golden boys, Geitner, Summers, and Bernanke frantically looting us in plain sight. Obama's just making sure they've got plenty of dollars stashed away when gas jumps to $20 per gallon.
If Obama had any decency, he'd stop the obscenely wasteful spending on satanic war toys and focus on alternate energy development in preparation for the inevitable. But, I wouldn't hold my breath. Obama it seems, has very little empathy for the American people.
He's now setting the scene to sign a health reform bill that will not provide relief for Americans nor competition for insurance companies. Which has been his stance from the beginning, depite the rhetoric. It's been a done deal for months already. He's just figuring out how to pull it off without getting his hands dirty. He's a real sneaky bastard. Bush, we knew he was a bastard. Obama's worse because he a two faced swindler.
Making a dent in this DOES mean "stopping growth" -- we would need a steady state economy to do any of this.
http://www.steadystate.org has details.
we don't need to live in caves, but we do need to live in permaculture ecovillages with local food production
it's not about "new technology" but rather that fossil fuels are more concentrated than the alternatives, and it requires fossil fuel inputs to make wind turbines, etc. it would be nice to see a city anywhere decide to cancel highway expansion in order to invest the rest of the oil in "powering down"
---
The mass media, politicians and most environmental groups do not want to ask why our society largely ignored warnings about climate change. Few consider how Peak Oil and Climate Change are two ways of looking at the same problem of overconsumption and that depletion is how we will reduce our carbon footprint.
The best analyses of Peak Oil and Climate Change conclude these problems would have to be addressed a decade or two before they reach full strength - yet both problems are here, now. The shadow government (military industrial complex) did not want to deal with these problems because the solutions are inherently decentralized and our monetary system requires ever increasing growth. Since we missed the opportunity to solve these issues as gently as possible, governments are creating a global surveillance police state to suppress dissent as the oil that runs the show becomes scarce and expensive, and climate change reduces food and water supplies.
www.oilempire.us/triple-crisis.html
Like the fool Penn St econ prof I told off today, these idiots still think you can have infinite growth on a finite planet. To get the sort of reduction in CO2 that's really needed, we must cut emissions 50% yesterday. But at least they want to do something about the Climate Crisis.
Quote of the Week:
Organic Can Save the World from Climate Chaos
"... carbon sequestration is the best way to buy time in a warming world. Cutting emissions will help, but not as immediately as sequestration...food production must be fundamentally restructured to simultaneously preempt and react to the devastating effects of climate change. ...organic agriculture presents an untapped solution, an underutilized carbon sink at the ready. ...if the world's 3.5 billion tillable acres could be transitioned to organic agriculture now, land could sequester almost 40 percent of our current carbon emissions. No other proposed carbon mitigation solution comes close to that potential impact, particularly using existing and readily available technology."
Rodale Institute, February 2009
(From Organic Consumers Association)
Learn More
http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_19229.cfm
Another group of people-unclear-on-the-concept heard from.
They don't seem to grasp that it was the human population explosion + the conversion of forests to farms to support all the new humans that's doing us in. Forests=CO2 consumers, oxygen producers. Humans=oxygen consumers, CO2 producers. Less oxygen + more CO2=more stupidity + higher temperatures.
Maitead - Overpopulation or overconsumption?
Many countries with exploding populations regularly have the smallest carbon footprints. Forests are being cleared not for poor people in countries with exploding populations, but to feed vechiles with biofuels in rich countries, and to grow grain to put meat on the tables in rich overconsuming countries.
The best way to stop deforestation is to stop logging exports to rich overconsumers, stop deforestation for biofuels, stop or reduce meat eating.
Farm animals and meat eating contibute more greenhouse gas than motor vehicles. The poor people with exploding populations are not the greatest meat eaters and don't drive gas guzzlers.
Conclusion - overconsumption is a more immediate problem than overpopulation!!