How to Think About the Costs of Climate Change

There’s some parallel with military spending. In the 1950s and ’60s, during the Cold War, the United States spent more than 10 percent of G.D.P. on national defense (it’s now below 4 percent).

Most of that spending crowded out other forms of economic activity; many houses and cars and washing machines weren’t made because of the resources that instead went to making tanks, bombs and fighter jets. But some of that spending also created long-term benefits for society, like the innovations that led to the internet and to reliable commercial jet aircraft travel.

Certain types of efforts to reduce carbon emissions or adapt to climate impacts are likely to generate similar benefits, says Nicholas Stern, chair of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics.

“You couldn’t provide sea defenses at large scale without very heavy investment, but it’s not investment of the kind that you get from the things that breed technological progress,” Mr. Stern said. “The defensive adaptations don’t carry anything like the dynamism that comes from different ways of doing things.”

There is more fertile ground in areas like transportation and infrastructure, he said. Electric cars, instead of those with internal combustion engines, would mean less air pollution in cities, for example.

How should we value the future compared with the present?

Seeking a baseline to devise environmental regulations, the Obama administration set out to calculate a “social cost of carbon,” the amount of harm each new ton of carbon emissions will cause in decades ahead.

At the core of the project were sophisticated efforts to model how a hotter earth will affect thousands of different places. That’s necessary because a low-lying region that already has many hot days a year is likely to face bigger problems, sooner, than a higher-altitude location that currently has a temperate climate.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/upshot/how-to-think-about-the-costs-of-climate-change.html?partner=rss&emc=rss