Tackling climate change: A bargain

A Bargain


From the Economist, May 4, 2007:

This story eventually gets down to an estimate of what it would cost to alleviate the problem of global warming:


"And what is the right price? The report says that to stabilise greenhouse-gas concentrations at 550 parts per million (a level most scientists think safeish) would require a price of $20-50 per tonne of carbon by 2020-30. That is along the lines of the carbon price established the European Emissions-Trading Scheme, which varied between $6 and $40 in 2005-06. It has not bankrupted the European economy so far. The IPCC’s economic models reckon, on average, that if the world adopted such a price the global economy would be 1.3% smaller than it otherwise would have been by 2050; or, put another way, global economic growth would be 0.1% a year lower than it otherwise would have been."

My Take: This is obviously a deal; put simply, it's the cost of doing business. If we fail to act, the costs to our global society would be unimaginable; if we think of no other scenario, think about the unrest that would be caused by rising sea levels displacing the great portion of the world's populations that live seaside. The positive envirohuman impact of putting a price on polluting is far reaching, because until we do so, most businesses will continue to pollute, if for no other reason, it's cheaper in the short term to do so.