I'm not wild about gotcha journalism. But geez I'd love to ask some of the people writing about climate some basic questions. What are total CO2 emissions per year? What percentage is due to the US? To China? To coal? To power generation?
-
-
The Stern Review - which I have not read - estimated costs around 1% of global GDP. IIRC he later said his estimate was somewhat too low. My half-assed guess is it was actually too high - dealing with crises tends to produce hard-to-anticipate benefits. Still, 1% is substantial
-
Currently the US is about 16% of world GDP. We spend about 6% of US GDP on administrative obstacles to healthcare providers and payers communicating with each other. Mandating a standard interface there would save 6% of US GDP, which is 1% of world GDP, which might be enough…
- 3 more replies
New conversation -
-
-
You don't see existential risk?
-
I see potential catastrophe. I’m suggesting that averting the catastrophe is relatively inexpensive. [There’s a semantic debate about whether 99.9% of humans dying counts as “existential,” inasmuch as humans still exist; that’s dumb imo, but important to some utilitarians.]
- 3 more replies
New conversation -
-
-
Exactly. This is a false dilemma. Further, with continued economic growth, it seems quite likely the cost will go _down_ (as a % of gdp). Trying to solve this in the 50s with battery/solar/nuclear costing orders of magnitude more would’t have at all been feasible.
-
Just to add some numbers: carbon intensity (carbon / GDP) has been dropping 18% a decade in the US (1990-2014, most recent year available).
- 1 more reply
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.