I’m afraid to say there are a lot of room for improvement here. As others have pointed out, most climate justice advocates do not literally think it will wipe out humanity, they think it will kill a large amount of people and make life very bad for others, and want to prevent this for obvious reasons.
But I mainly have to take serious issue with paragraphs like the one here:
In 2017 and 2018, the world invested an annual average of $579 billion dollars on climate change. This marks a 25% increase from 2015 and 2016 (Buchner, 2019). In the same period, greenhouse gas emissions have increased from 46.76 to 48.94 billion tonnes (Ritchie, 2020). The increase in spending from 2016 to 2017 did not correspond to any decline in emission rates. Clearly, the optimum amount to spend on mitigating climate change is less than what is currently being allocated.
There are so, so many things wrong with this paragraph. For starters, you can’t expect the effect of mitigation efforts to be instantaneous, it takes time to build things. A nuclear power plant could take 10 years to build, you don’t see the mitigation effect for a whole decade. And investments in energy technology research will look worthless for many, many years, until they finally pay off and save huge amounts of emissions.
Secondly, much of these are investments, not donations, so much of that money is not lost. If you put a solar panel on your house (under good conditions), it will pay itself off in several years, and yet this would not be taken into account in your 500 billion figure.
Thirdly, the emissions increasing doesn’t mean the money didn’t do anything. Emissions always increase if we do nothing to stop them. It is likely the case that emissions would have increased much more if there were no mitigation efforts in place.
fourthly, the whole premise doesn’t make sense. If the current amount of money isn’t enough to stop emissions rising, thats more of an argument for increasing funding, not decreasing it. Otherwise how would you stop emissions hitting 11 degree doom level? ( of course, the actual answer is that mitigation efforts are working, albeit slowly, but that contradicts your argument).
I’m afraid to say there are a lot of room for improvement here. As others have pointed out, most climate justice advocates do not literally think it will wipe out humanity, they think it will kill a large amount of people and make life very bad for others, and want to prevent this for obvious reasons.
But I mainly have to take serious issue with paragraphs like the one here:
There are so, so many things wrong with this paragraph. For starters, you can’t expect the effect of mitigation efforts to be instantaneous, it takes time to build things. A nuclear power plant could take 10 years to build, you don’t see the mitigation effect for a whole decade. And investments in energy technology research will look worthless for many, many years, until they finally pay off and save huge amounts of emissions.
Secondly, much of these are investments, not donations, so much of that money is not lost. If you put a solar panel on your house (under good conditions), it will pay itself off in several years, and yet this would not be taken into account in your 500 billion figure.
Thirdly, the emissions increasing doesn’t mean the money didn’t do anything. Emissions always increase if we do nothing to stop them. It is likely the case that emissions would have increased much more if there were no mitigation efforts in place.
fourthly, the whole premise doesn’t make sense. If the current amount of money isn’t enough to stop emissions rising, thats more of an argument for increasing funding, not decreasing it. Otherwise how would you stop emissions hitting 11 degree doom level? ( of course, the actual answer is that mitigation efforts are working, albeit slowly, but that contradicts your argument).
I have no background in economics, so these insights are extremely valuable to me. Thank you for taking the time out to comment :)