Can You Spare $45T to Curb Global Warming?

$45 Trillion sounds like a lot, but it is less than we would spend doing nothing, and “going to hell in a hand basket”. Take installing solar panels, for example. Actually they are free, because they pay for themselves with the electricity they generate, in 15 to 20 years, and then continue to provide free electricity for another 10 years. Wind turbines are even cheaper, as they pay for themselves in 7 to 8 years. So the problem is not the cost, because we are going to spend more money not fixing the problem, but the problem is educating people to realize what our priorities are and what we need to do to fix the problem, and then just doing it. Isn’t that what Nike says, “Just do it”?

“According to Jim Hansen of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, to whom many political and environmental leaders turn on climate-change questions, we must reduce greenhouse gases by 80 percent within 12 years or it will be too late to prevent a climate catastrophe. Hansen thinks this won’t happen because it simply costs too much.”—“Buying Time on Greenhouse Gases,” ScrippsNews.com

“I’m going to tell you something I probably shouldn’t: we may not be able to stop global warming. We need to begin curbing global greenhouse emissions right now, but more than a decade after the signing of the Kyoto Protocol, the world has utterly failed to do so. Unless the geopolitics of global warming change soon, the Hail Mary pass of geoengineering might become our best shot.”—Bryan Walsh, Time Magazine, 17 March 2008

“Few seem to realise that the present IPCC models predict almost unanimously that by 2040 the average summer in Europe will be as hot as the summer of 2003 when over 30,000 died from heat. By then we may cool ourselves with air conditioning and learn to live in a climate no worse than that of Baghdad now. But without extensive irrigation the plants will die and both farming and natural ecosystems will be replaced by scrub and desert. What will there be to eat? The same dire changes will affect the rest of the world and I can envisage Americans migrating into Canada and the Chinese into Siberia but there may be little food for any of them.”—Dr James Lovelock’s lecture to the Royal Society, 29 Oct. ‘07