The climate crisis will destroy our economies – we learned this 20 years ago. When will we act? | Fiona Harvey
Source: The Guardian ·
The radical Stern report showed that a low-carbon future is also good economics. But it seems that capitalism needs a reminderSaving the only planet we have makes good economic sense. There is, after all, no money to be made on a dead Earth. There may be costs involved now, but they are worth paying to protect our children from certain destruction.These propositions seem self-evident now. But…
From the source
Saving the only planet we have makes good economic sense. There is, after all, no money to be made on a dead Earth. There may be costs involved now, but they are worth paying to protect our children from certain destruction. These propositions seem self-evident now. But two decades ago, mainstream economists had very different ideas. 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. 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. What changed? Twenty years ago this week an earth-shaking report was published by Nicholas Stern, a former World Bank chief economist turned adviser to Gordon Brown. His review, The Economics of Climate Change, upended conventional wisdom among economists and dragged them into a new century. It set out,…
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