Thinking Bigger Than Yourself

crookedindifference:

Comparing Global GDP loss to Climate Change

One of Manzi’s central points is that climate change just ain’t all that damaging, economically speaking: it will reduce global GDP by “only” 5 percent one hundred years.

Let’s see how much of the world we can destroy before getting to 5% of global GDP.

So, we’ll have to settle for just these 81 countries, which collectively have a mere 2,865,623,000 people, or about 43 percent of the world’s population. We’ve gotten rid of almost all of Sub-Saharan Africa, destroyed the entire Indian subcontinent, created a big lake in South America, turned El Salvador into an island, and solved a lot of our problems in the Middle East.

Coincidentally, or not, a lot of these countries are located in the tropics, where global warming would probably have its most pernicious effects. True, they would probably not be entirely eradicated even under some of the worst-case, fattest-tail climate change assumptions. But if you reduced their GDPs by, say, 40 percent, it would look like mere rounding error on the world scene.

Nate Silver and Bradford Plumer point out the flaws in Jim Manzi’s critisicm of the Waxman-Markey (“cap-and-trade”) bill that the House approved on June 26th.

I’m not saying that cap-and-trade is a perfect solution, because believe me, it really isn’t … but this whole “climate change isn’t economically damaging” is the biggest crock of over-privileged, capitalist ignorance and lack of concern for anything that is not a direct pocket-liner. I hates it … this is actually the most infuriating argument I’ve heard against climate regulation in a long while.