The Price of Everything - Eduardo Porter [99]
If temperatures were allowed to increase further, damages could become catastrophic. As Greenland’s ice pack melted, rising sea levels could cover the Netherlands, the alluvial planes of Bangladesh, and about one third of Florida and Louisiana. Regardless of how one personally values nature’s ecosystems, this would be a problem. By 2050, the world is expected to have 2.5 billion more people. On present trends, they would have to feed themselves with 10 percent less fresh water.
Until recently, the call to arms against warming was couched in terms of lost species and melting polar ice. But a few years ago, a team led by Sir Nicholas Stern, former chief economist of the World Bank, changed the terms of the debate with a report for the British Treasury that detailed the cost of climate change in strict economic terms.
If we continue spewing carbon into the air at our present pace, Stern concluded, the damage inflicted on the planet later this century and the next would be frightening, “on a scale similar to those associated with the great wars and the economic depression of the first half of the 20th century.”
The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, published in 2006, estimated that the future cost of our folly would amount to at least 5 percent of the world’s total economic production and perhaps up to 20 percent “now and forever.” A fifth of the world’s gross domestic product is about $12 trillion. Losing that would be equivalent to, say, losing four fifths of the American economy. Or losing the entire economies of China, Japan, and India.
THE ETHICS OF TOMORROW
Shouldn’t we be more worried?
I found the first reference to the concept of climate change in the New York Times in September of 1955, running above a story about an electronic brain that could search a dictionary for the right word. In October of 1958, George H. T. Kimble, chairman of the geography department of Indiana University, wrote an article in the Times Magazine titled “Why the Weird Weather,” in which he mentioned CO2, and sunspots, as potential culprits of strange weather patterns that included May snow in Portugal, a heat wave in Czechoslovakia, and Florida’s wettest March on record. By February 14 of 1979 the Times science editor, Walter Sullivan, was writing that “there is a real possibility that some people now in their infancy will live to a time when the ice at the North Pole will have melted.”
Thirty years later, shipping lines, mining companies, and oil firms are waiting with baited breath as the forbidding masses of ice over the North Pole thaw—opening up oil and mineral deposits as well as new shipping lanes over the top of the world. Yet despite the crescendo of warning, the world’s people and its leaders have proved incapable of agreeing on a decisive course of action to drastically reduce emissions of carbon. In December 2009, world leaders left a supposedly crucial summit on global climate in Copenhagen much as they arrived, with no firm agreement to cut emissions of carbon dioxide. The Obama administration was unable to persuade the United States Senate to pass a cap and trade plan to limit carbon emissions in 2010.
Hammered by economic troubles, Americans appeared to lose interest in the perils of the weather. In early 2010, only 32 percent of Americans said global warming amounted to a serious threat, 16 percent thought the damages would not materialize in their lifetime, and 19 percent thought it would never happen.
The notion that we must curb our carbon emissions has many natural foes. ExxonMobil alone spewed 306 million tons of greenhouse gases in 2007. The American Electric Power Company emitted more than 150 million. A forty-dollar levy on each ton of CO2 would amount to almost half of the power company’s revenue and six times its profits.
But opposition is broader than that. Republicans mostly oppose legislation to cut carbon