In a nutshell

[forsyth]

One of the most common complaints (I hesitate to call it a counter-argument, because it's not really an argument, just a reflexive cry) against any kind of environmental stuff is always "It's expensive and it will hurt businesses! It'll slow down economic growth!"

This argument basically relies on innumeracy. It depends confusing people with numbers that sound big, but aren't in their context. There's an excellent post over at Crooked Timber about sustainability and living standards, there's a lot of economist-speak in it, so let me highlight the key paragraph.

"Even the sharpest critics among economists only suggested that Stern’s estimates were at the optimistic end of a plausible range, the upper end of which might be 5 per cent of national income, or around two years of economic growth. That is, by 2050, a low-carbon economy might have the material living standards that would otherwise have been reached by 2048."

That's the thing about economic growth. If we grow more slowly than we might have, we're not poorer, we're just less richer than we theoretically might have been. But we're still richer!

This has been tonight's installment of explanations.

Comments

[amazingadrian.livejournal.com]

The way things are going now, the world economy is slowing down anyways. It almost seems like we've reached our peak, and now have to decline a bit before we can start going up again. I really doubt switching to environmentalism will hurt businesses any more than not-switching will, at this point.

[forsythferret.livejournal.com]

Not doing anything about the environmental problems staring at us will definitely cost more than fixing and preventing them. By orders of magnitude. The disruptions that will be caused by massive climate change alone will cost untold amounts of money and cause untold amounts of misery and possibly death.

And that's why the "Environmentalists hate the poor!" crap that polluters push is also crap. Because guess what, the costs of these catastrophes will fall hardest on the poor too.

[amazingadrian.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, definitely.

Nobody is sure what we can and can't do in regards to climate change. We might be able to prevent it, we might not. It isn't even a sure thing that humans are playing a part in it (though yeah, I wouldn't be at all surprised if we were).

Still, the more businesses that operate pro actively in regards to environmentalism, the better things will be for everyone in the long run. And yeah, that's a load of beans if I ever saw one. The poor as a group are affected strongly by everything. We're seeing some of that now with rising food prices.

[forsythferret.livejournal.com]

Well, preventing it is kind of beside the point. Temperatures have already risen, the climate is already changing. What we can do now is hopefully prevent it from hitting a tipping point that reinforces things like glacial melting, droughts, etc, and warms the world more, and throws off all the systems that we rely on for water, food, and air.

The question of if humans are playing a role has been pretty much settled for years in every study not funded by the fossil fuel industry. The CO2 and NO2 and other gasses we're putting into the air are trapping more heat, which puts more energy into the weather system, which means the weather gets more extreme and warmer on the whole.

There's many things we can do, and most of them are not all that expensive on their own. And many many times cheaper than the refugee crises, massive relocations, starvation, extinctions, and so on that could result if we allow temperatures to increase unchecked.