Looming Cost of Saving Earth: $535 Trillion
By James Donahue
August 17, 2010
It seems that only a few years ago that climate scientists were calculating the cost of capping the world’s greenhouse gasses and getting the heating of our planet under control was an estimated $1 trillion. That was in 2006 with figures based on a comprehensive study by PricewaterhouseCoopers.
It seemed like a very big price tag at the time. But with governments now spending multi-trillions of dollars fighting senseless wars and with the United States now topping a debt of $18 trillion, we can look back and consider it to have been a very good price tag for something so important to world interests.
Today, even with many government and industrial leaders struggling to cap carbon emissions and convert to air, solar and water methods of generating power, our overcrowded planet is still heating, the ice caps are melting, and the exposed sea floors are spewing tons of an even more deadly greenhouse gas . . . methane. The rush by oil and gas companies to stay in the game through fracking of the lower rock formations is releasing additional high volumes of methane.
In other words, we are still speeding up the heating of our Mother Earth. And it seems that few people care. Certainly our newly elected President Donald Trump isn’t worried. He has withdrawn the U.S. from the 2015 Paris Agreement which is critical for world nations to collectively reach an established global heating limit of less than 2 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels, and a 1.5 degree Celsius goal by 2030.
Some researchers are now saying that we have allowed this problem to get out of control. They worry that we may now be in a state of runaway global heating and nothing we can do will stop our planet from turning into a dead steaming rock with temperatures too high to support life. Others are more optimistic . . . but their optimism hinges on a joint willingness on the part of everyone to make drastic changes in the way we live and do business. And we must do it immediately if our children and grandchildren can hope to have a world to live in.
A new study by researchers from the United States, France, China, the United Kingdom and Australia, and led by Professor James Hansen, director of the U.S. space agency NASA’s Institute for Space Studies, and professor at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, now puts that new price tag on maintaining a habitable temperature at a whopping $535 trillion.
That figure is largely based on our ability to create, design and build technologies engineered to suck billions of tons of greenhouse gasses from the air by the year 2100. It also depends on human ability to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by six percent a year, beginning immediately. Included in this plan is better forest and agricultural management, which will mean the end of slashing forests and a drastic cut in raising animals; especially beef for food.
Unfortunately, the Capitalistic system of doing business has been getting in the way of every effort to put the brakes on greenhouse gas emissions ever since the world governments drafted the Kyoto Protocol in Japan in 1992. The Paris Accord reached in 2015 was perhaps a last-ditch effort by world governments to force action. And even though world leaders . . . including U.S. President Barack Obama . . . agreed to take drastic steps to put the brakes on industrial and traffic emissions, international action has been slow to start. And Trump, the newly elected U.S. president, has flatly withdrawn from the Paris Agreement. Trump argues that global warming is a hoax and he is shutting his ears to scientific data that says otherwise.
The United States remains the world leader in creating greenhouse gas emissions. Without our participation, it looks like we are all blindly rushing like the fabled lemmings toward the cliff of extinction. And it may be coming down upon us sooner than anybody might realize. Crop failures, extreme weather changes, disease causing insects and even the trees are reacting to the warming planet. Our oceans have collected all of the excess heat they can hold. Sea creatures are dying. Ice caps are melting. Island nations and ocean front communities are beginning to flood as sea levels rise.
Said Hansen: “Continued high fossil fuel emissions would saddle young people with a massive, expensive cleanup problem and growing deleterious climate impacts, which should provide incentive and obligation for governments to alter energy policies without further delay.”
The consequences of failing to listen to this extreme and perhaps final warning appear to be too terrible to contemplate.
By James Donahue
August 17, 2010
It seems that only a few years ago that climate scientists were calculating the cost of capping the world’s greenhouse gasses and getting the heating of our planet under control was an estimated $1 trillion. That was in 2006 with figures based on a comprehensive study by PricewaterhouseCoopers.
It seemed like a very big price tag at the time. But with governments now spending multi-trillions of dollars fighting senseless wars and with the United States now topping a debt of $18 trillion, we can look back and consider it to have been a very good price tag for something so important to world interests.
Today, even with many government and industrial leaders struggling to cap carbon emissions and convert to air, solar and water methods of generating power, our overcrowded planet is still heating, the ice caps are melting, and the exposed sea floors are spewing tons of an even more deadly greenhouse gas . . . methane. The rush by oil and gas companies to stay in the game through fracking of the lower rock formations is releasing additional high volumes of methane.
In other words, we are still speeding up the heating of our Mother Earth. And it seems that few people care. Certainly our newly elected President Donald Trump isn’t worried. He has withdrawn the U.S. from the 2015 Paris Agreement which is critical for world nations to collectively reach an established global heating limit of less than 2 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels, and a 1.5 degree Celsius goal by 2030.
Some researchers are now saying that we have allowed this problem to get out of control. They worry that we may now be in a state of runaway global heating and nothing we can do will stop our planet from turning into a dead steaming rock with temperatures too high to support life. Others are more optimistic . . . but their optimism hinges on a joint willingness on the part of everyone to make drastic changes in the way we live and do business. And we must do it immediately if our children and grandchildren can hope to have a world to live in.
A new study by researchers from the United States, France, China, the United Kingdom and Australia, and led by Professor James Hansen, director of the U.S. space agency NASA’s Institute for Space Studies, and professor at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, now puts that new price tag on maintaining a habitable temperature at a whopping $535 trillion.
That figure is largely based on our ability to create, design and build technologies engineered to suck billions of tons of greenhouse gasses from the air by the year 2100. It also depends on human ability to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by six percent a year, beginning immediately. Included in this plan is better forest and agricultural management, which will mean the end of slashing forests and a drastic cut in raising animals; especially beef for food.
Unfortunately, the Capitalistic system of doing business has been getting in the way of every effort to put the brakes on greenhouse gas emissions ever since the world governments drafted the Kyoto Protocol in Japan in 1992. The Paris Accord reached in 2015 was perhaps a last-ditch effort by world governments to force action. And even though world leaders . . . including U.S. President Barack Obama . . . agreed to take drastic steps to put the brakes on industrial and traffic emissions, international action has been slow to start. And Trump, the newly elected U.S. president, has flatly withdrawn from the Paris Agreement. Trump argues that global warming is a hoax and he is shutting his ears to scientific data that says otherwise.
The United States remains the world leader in creating greenhouse gas emissions. Without our participation, it looks like we are all blindly rushing like the fabled lemmings toward the cliff of extinction. And it may be coming down upon us sooner than anybody might realize. Crop failures, extreme weather changes, disease causing insects and even the trees are reacting to the warming planet. Our oceans have collected all of the excess heat they can hold. Sea creatures are dying. Ice caps are melting. Island nations and ocean front communities are beginning to flood as sea levels rise.
Said Hansen: “Continued high fossil fuel emissions would saddle young people with a massive, expensive cleanup problem and growing deleterious climate impacts, which should provide incentive and obligation for governments to alter energy policies without further delay.”
The consequences of failing to listen to this extreme and perhaps final warning appear to be too terrible to contemplate.