The climate crisis will destroy our economies – we learned this 20 years ago. When will we act? | Fiona Harvey
They had proved that the climate crisis would be a mere economic blip, easily absorbed by growing economies and therefore not worth spending money on.
Key points
- There may be costs involved now, but they are worth paying to protect our children from certain destruction.
- But two decades ago, mainstream economists had very different ideas.
- But it seems that capitalism needs a reminder Saving the only planet we have makes good economic sense.
In their accounting, they considered ice caps and glaciers functionally worthless, that trees only add to GDP when they are cut down, and that a livable climate shouldn’t even merit a line on a spreadsheet.
Fiona Harvey is an environment editor at the Guardian Continue reading...
Additional details
- The radical Stern report showed that a low-carbon future is also good economics.
- There is, after all, no money to be made on a dead Earth.
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