What Should Americans Pay to Address Climate Change?

A little while back Adam Tooze, the indefatigable economist, <a href="https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-carbon-notes-3-four-trillion" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">wrote in his newsletter</a> about the economics of climate change. He discussed a study that put a firm dollar figure on tackling the planetary environmental crisis: <blockquote> If you ask the question — what would it take to put the world on a track of sustainable development? — the best guesses of the experts who have spent most time trying to figure this out tend to congregate around $4 trillion in investment, per annum over the next decade. This was the conclusion of a panel of experts working for the COP27 meeting in November 2022 headed up by Vera Songwe, Nicholas Stern and Amar Bhattacharya. </blockquote> Four trillion! Per year! Well, it’s a firm number, at least! A little more concrete than what we usually hear, which is something like: “We must fundamentally transform our economy.” This money, if wisely spent — on developing new technologies, deploying the clean tech we already have, and helping vulnerable parts of the world adapt to the climate change that is coming no matter what — could be our ticket out of the mess we’ve created for ourselves. It will be the price of having the continued privilege of living on a healthy planet. One question, though. Is $4,000,000,000,000 a lot of money or a little? Tooze argues that it’s not really that much — as a percentage of global GDP, it’s not far from the amount that Cold War countries were spending on defense between the Korean War and the period of detente. We don’t tend to look back at 1961 as a time of immense hardship and sacrifice. Tooze <a href="https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-carbon-notes-3-four-trillion" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">concludes</a>: <a href="https://medium.com/the-new-climate/what-should-americans-pay-to-address-climate-change-15af2409d7a2">Visit Now</a>