Costing Climate Change by George Monbiot




“Either we decide that it is right to spend a lot of money seeking to prevent catastrophic climate change or we decide that it isn’t, but we must make that decision on the grounds of how much we value people and places as people and places, rather than as figures in a ledger.”

“In 1996, for example, a study for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated that a life lost in the poor nations could be priced at $150,000, while a life lost in the rich nations could be assessed at $1.5 million . . . they discovered that the lives of rich people were worth more than the lives of poor people.”

“So anything that cannot be quantified is simply excluded from the balance sheet. What this means is that the loss of all the really important things — a functioning ecosystem, human communities, human life — is overlooked. Because they aren’t counted, they don’t count.”

“We could reasonably ask why governments seem to find it so easy to raise the money required to wreck the biosphere, and so difficult to raise the money required to save it.”

“So please don’t take the ‘costs’ of climate change — either its impacts or action prevent it — at face value. Even when teased apart, they mean less than economists claim. We cannot use a spreadsheet to decide whether or not to act. We can only use our conscience.”

“Taking action, in other words, must be a moral decision, not an economic one.”

Read the full article at the New Internationalists

 

Keywords : climate change, quantification, earth’s life-support systems, ecosystem, community, money, economics, conscience, moral
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