Climate Versus Economy: Yale Model Allows You to Decide
by Christine Lepisto, Berlin on 05. 6.08
If you live in a democracy, then your vote helps to decide how politicians should act to curb carbon dioxide emissions and achieve energy independence. But how can the average voter make sense of it all? The IPCC says we must act now or we miss the window of opportunity to spare future generations from untold suffering. The climate change denialists cry that economic collapse will cause untold suffering in the short to middle term if we commit to strong action for change. What should you believe? To the rescue: Yale Professor Robert Repetto, professor in the practice of economics and sustainable development, has developed an interactive website that calculates the costs of climate change. Yale, presumably staying on the cutting edge of modern marketing, now offers this 5-minute YouTube video to draw people into Repetto's website.
Professor Repetto's web site, See For Yourself, allows you to make the assumptions which control the predictions of his meta-model. See For Yourself is considered a meta-model because it combines many models developed by various economists. Studying the different models for calculating the economic impact of reducing carbon dioxide emissions, Professor Repetto discovered that the main differences in the outcomes of the various models are due to only seven key assumptions.
See For Yourself allows each visitor to input their own opinions on these seven assumptions. You can play with changing your assumptions and see the impact on the final calculations. And, quite significantly, you can better understand the important questions behind climate policy. Knowledge is power.
Via Dave DeFusco of ::Yale
One problem: economic growth is no longer (or maybe never was) a good thing.
Watch Dr. Albert A. Bartlett's presentation "Arithmetic, Population, and Energy" here or here.
Wrong question.
You can protect the environment AND have economic growth simultaneously. The trick is to do it, and to do it well.
Please don't encourage simplistic and false dichotomies.
Tony:
That's easy enough to say when you have access to a computer. Somebody living on $1 per day would probably tell you something different.
The problem is that with a world population growth rate of ~1.15% per year, a world GDP increase less than that is a declining world per capita GDP, and (usually) increased poverty. The size of the world population is clearly unsustainable, so we can't reduce poverty and make the world more sustainable is to reduce world population.
@Jon: I agree, but only to a point. There is only so much room for growth before an economy can no longer be sustained. And since we have had an economy that can't be sustained for decades or longer, it seems silly to think that we can keep on growing.
What do you propose be consumed if there is to be both economic growth and a healthy environment that can sustain itself? It might be possible, but not on the resources being consumed at the moment. In this sense I see no reason for economic growth. Something (in this case "the economy") that thrives on ever-lasting growth will drive itself to suicide.
@Dan: You first bit is a simplified, fallacious argument (non sequiter) that has little to do with what I was getting at. We could have 0% economic growth for 100 years, and assuming there is still some way to produce electricity, I (although I doubt I'll still be alive) could still use a computer. Likewise, we could even experience economic shrinkage and I'd still be able to use a computer.
Growth, in this sense too, is completely unnecessary.
Furthermore, what exactly are you suggesting? Understand that the people across the globe who are living in poverty were made to live that way because of development. When people were living in native, tribal or otherwise sustainable societies, there was no such thing as poverty; the industrialization of these societies created it. If you want to know what causes poverty, you can accurate point to economic growth.
I don't think growth is environmentally responsible at this point. We have too many people already for the earth to sustain us.
Yes, we'd all like to think that we can give a few commands to our government and favorite stores and keep living just as we used to, except green. And some of us like the idea of profits from growth.
But at this point, growth is suicide, for us and the planet. I have to also ask: other than technology, has humanity done anything impressive for a long time? I can't think of anything. I see a species in decline, justifying its own growth on the basis of some human ideal that it doesn't even live up to.