By 2050, the US Will Lose $83 Billion a Year Because of All the Nature We've Destroyed (fastcompany.com) 187
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fast Company: The world economy depends on nature, from coral reefs that protect coastal cities from flooding to insects that pollinate crops. But by the middle of the century, the loss of key "ecosystem services" could cost the world $479 billion each year. The U.S. will lose more than any other country, with an $83 billion loss to the GDP per year by 2050. That's a conservative estimate. The projection comes from a report, called Global Futures, from World Wildlife Fund, which looked at only six of the services that nature provides and how those might change because of the impacts of climate breakdown, lost wildlife habitat, and other human-caused destruction of nature. (Many other services will also be impacted but can't currently be accurately modeled; the study also doesn't take into account the possibility of tipping points that lead to sudden, catastrophic losses of natural services.) By 2050, if the world continues on its current path, the global economy could lose $327 billion a year as we lose natural coastal protection from coral reefs, mangrove forests, and other natural systems. Another $128 billion could be lost annually from forests and peatlands that store carbon. Agriculture could lose $15 billion from lost pollinators and $19 billion from reduced water availability. Food costs are likely to go up, threatening food security in some regions. "In the U.S., the biggest losses will come from lost coastal protection and losses in marine fisheries," adds Fast Company. "Because of the size of the U.S. economy, it will lose most in absolute terms. But developing countries will be hit hardest in terms of the percentage of GDP lost; Madagascar tops that list, followed by Togo, Vietnam, and Mozambique."
If the world is able to radically change course and protect areas most critical for biodiversity and ecosystem services, the global annual GDP could, instead, grow $11 billion by 2050.
If the world is able to radically change course and protect areas most critical for biodiversity and ecosystem services, the global annual GDP could, instead, grow $11 billion by 2050.
Not nearly enough. (Score:2)
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83 billion a year, even if lost directly by the US oligarchy, can readily be reimbursed by a very small increase in the US government debt. Nobody will even blink.
The budgeted interterest payments on federal loans for the fiscal year 2020 is $479 billion. https://www.thebalance.com/int... [thebalance.com]
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83 billion a year, even if lost directly by the US oligarchy, can readily be reimbursed by a very small increase in the US government debt. Nobody will even blink.
The budgeted interterest payments on federal loans for the fiscal year 2020 is $479 billion. https://www.thebalance.com/int... [thebalance.com]
What the hell are you two going on about? This is talking about loss to GDP. Gross Domestic Product. This has nothing to do with federal borrowing.... This is a reduction in the total value of all Goods and Services produced by the United States. It's fucking pocket change.
US GDP is predicted to be about $32 trillion by 2030.. Our GDP is projected to increase by $10 T per decade for the next few decades, so by 2050, we should be somewhere near $50 Trillion GPD ...
Assuming some trend is infinitely sustainable is the root cause of every bubble, every economic crash and every recession in modern human history.
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$83 billion sounds like a lot of money. By itself it is, but in the context of the GDP of the US, it's not a big number. It's a tiny number.
Even in the context of the US GDP, it isn't a tiny number. A yearly loss of $83 billion represents about 15-20% of the US annual GDP growth, so it is noticeable. When the taxfoundation estimated the current China trade war would cost about $64 billion in GDP it equated that to the loss of about 200,000 jobs. Again, not catastrophic in a nation with 150 million jobs, but it does suggest an $83 billion year loss would equate to about a 1% increase in unemployment each decade.
i guess like always (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:i guess like always (Score:4, Insightful)
China is never looked at in any these studies/projection's cause they don't want to make them mad?
This is about White Man's Guilt, and the Chinese aren't white.
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This is about White Man's Guilt, and the Chinese aren't white.
They are honorary white people now, because they have acquired so much Evil Technology, and are thus eligible to share the Blame For All Ills.
I spend too much time in the outdoors to have any respect for environmental activists.
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The Political Correctness bullshit has gotten everything out of whack. It started off pretty good, but it went way too far.
It's the concept of diminishing returns. Today, I said something to signal my virtue and it made me feel a quantifiable amount of goodness for myself. Tomorrow, I'll have to step that up slightly in order to achieve that same level of "goodness". And the following day, I'll need to set fire to some old rich white guy just to keep the pace.
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Re:i guess like always (Score:4, Insightful)
"Black culture" is toxic. Has been since the law of unintended consequences made it more profitable to be single parent households for poor people. Mix in those who don't act like fucking savages are targeted as 'uncle toms' with the loss of a moral foundation (ie. 'church' has been replaced by money) and you have a problem. Nothing to do with skin color. Everything to do with culture.
Re:i guess like always (Score:4, Insightful)
China is already Communist — there is no need to kindle the fire of dissatisfaction necessary for the Revolution in it.
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Whataboutism or what?
Well then, let's spend! (Score:2, Interesting)
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Re:Well then, let's spend! (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Well then, let's spend! (Score:5, Insightful)
You say that like the plan is to take that money into a field and burn it - that there is and never will be a return on that investment. Furthermore, you're making an implicit assumption that continuing business as usual has zero cost, which it does not.
Consider this microeconomic analog: a homeowner that is considering a solar installation. The cost may be tens of thousands of dollars up front. That's a fair bit of capital, but it's not the end of the story. The installation will have a rated life of at least 25 years, and will produce something of value - electricity. (There are plenty of secondary and ancillary benefits, but let's stick just to kWh for now.) Meanwhile, if the homeowner doesn't pull the trigger and make this investment, he or she will absolutely end up paying someone else for electricity over that same 25-yr project life. Furthermore, the cost of the electricity produced by the PV array is quite predictable, while the future costs of grid-supplied electricity are not. What is the cost of that uncertainty? What is the value in reducing that uncertainty.
One cannot make an informed economic choice only by tallying the costs, but also considering the benefits, risks, and opportunity costs of alternatives (like doing nothing).
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You're ignoring the time-value of money. What if the homeowner put that money into a market account, tracking the S&P500 and averaged 8% return annually? Do they make more than $2000 per year in solar power? No? Then they are down money. Meaning resources to buy that energy elsewhere AND have additional funds for other improvements in their life.
Seems you forgot about the opportunity costs...
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Reading comprehension, dude. I concluded my comment with: "considering the benefits, risks, and opportunity costs of alternatives." I know how to plug a net-present-value calculation into Excel, and so does the business community. The fact that money is pouring into new solar installations suggests that there are plenty of cases where one can make money doing it.
When talking about government spending in general (defense, social security, etc.), and the
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As you note, money is not the problem with starvation. The problem is lawlessness, and lack of will to impose it. That *will* cost a lot more than $150 billion, but even then, money is not the issue.
What you have to do it go clean out the despots that run these places (unfortunately, almost all in Africa) with force, and then impose a solution on them, also with force, for at least a few *generations*, so all the people who remember the old ways die off (and, if you were to help them along with that, then O
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Google it is your friend.
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Re: Well then, let's spend! (Score:2)
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You're dealing with someone for whom the notion of "public good" is anathema. GLWT.
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Your retarded definition of "public good" is to take all the money away from citizens and give it to a corrupt, incompetent government to spend on waste, pork and enrich their cronies.
The fallacy in your argument is that in the US of today the corrupt, incompetent government and the deserving salt-of-the-earth wealthiest citizens you so admire and whose wealth you accuse him of wanting to appropriate are the same thing.
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How the fuck can you improve the lives of millions if you destroy the economy?
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So lets work the numbers. At a cost of about $80 trillion to benefit, lets say 2 million, that's $40 million benefits per person. I think someone is skimming quite a bit of the top. Because I don't think the Green New Deal ever proposed making multi-millionaires out of its beneficiaries.
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What do we get back for the investment? Seriously - what? I mean, there are models showing it MAY have an impact, but those models are slowly being shown to be false (especially the RCP8.5 model which seems to be the favorite to worry about because it predicts the worst results - even though it is highly unlikely we can even burn enough fossil fuels to get there [nature.com]. In other words, the fate you're trying to avoid is actually impossible to reach. So it's a waste.
However, we DO know that for less than 1% of
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But, but my organic, free range, probiotic food (Score:2)
I would be more concerned if there weren't hundreds of thousands of acres locally, growing all kinds of fruits and vegetables, and even free range chickens wandering into my yard.
If I was living at or below sea level, I would be looking into selling or renting, and increasing insurance.
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Is that all? (Score:5, Insightful)
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This "2.5% growth rate", is that supposed to last forever? That should produce some impressive numbers in a hundred years...
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So just destroy all the nature because the economy will cover that loss?
The point here is that someone is losing $83 billion because someone else is destroying nature for profit. It's the reason why "green" taxes are a good idea - they stop people externalizing their costs and help the people forced to pay them.
hmmm (Score:2, Insightful)
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It says it would be worth spending at least $83 billion to combat it, entirely independent of non-financial considerations such as quality of life.
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Nonsense, because we'll get many times that yield from agriculture, mining, etc.
It's nothing.
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Enjoy your life in hell.
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Our punishment is being inflicted with rightwing neo-nazi cultists driven by ideology and emotion with a totally unwarranted belief in their own moral superiority coupled with a compulsion to inflict their beliefs on others by any means necessary including violence.
FTFY
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this study shows is that financially it doesn't make sense
It shows the opposite to me, and I think, most rational observers. But please state your case, which you have not done.
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I'm going with the article for my case. You are going with handwaving about "lost revenue from knockon effects from not mining". As if mining must necessarily stop. If that's your case then you haven't got one.
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People get ill and die because of pollution. If you are ill or dying you can't really ignore it because it's only $83 billion which is nothing in the grand scheme of things.
The problem is you can't easily sue all the people destroying nature and polluting to recover your costs either. The damage is widely distributed and you won't be able to prove direct culpability in court.
The Population Bomb (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The Population Bomb (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, it was even more absurdly wrong than that:
Of course, that didn't happen, nor the predicted world revolution over starvation and overcrowding.Erlich was made a celebrity, and is still at it, predicting the same thing. While, in reality, the current production capacity of the earth GREATLY exceeds the requirements of survival, and production is intentionally restricted because there's not point in making any more, and overdoing crashes the price.
The only places people are routinely living on the edge of starvation are places that local politics and infighting prevents distribution. That could easily be solved by simply shooting everyone currently starving their own countrymen, but we aren't going to do that.
The entire history of these predictions is numbingly repetitive, a dire epochal disaster is coming, and when no one pays attention, the predictions become more and more shrill as they get desperate, until everybody just gets sick of them, and then someone starts a new cycle.
It's doing the world and science a great disservice to keep hyping one nonsensical cry of Wolf! over and over again. It undermines real work, and people eat up the sensationalist nonsense.
I guess this means ... (Score:2)
Green 101 - Always Make Far Flung Predictions (Score:3, Informative)
If you make predictions sufficiently far into the future, there's no way to refute them or have any rational debate. The green body has been using this technique for decades, making wild predictions about the future that are impossible to refute at the time.
Unfortunately for them, the internet has made it easy to look back and laugh at their predictions. Take this article [theguardian.com] in the Guardian from August 1999, which reports on a study by the University of East Anglia's climatic research unit. Yes, that's the same University of East Anglia the climategate emails were leaked from. It predicts that:
By 2020, visitors to the Costa del Sol could risk contracting malaria as global warming brings more frequent heatwaves, making the country a suitable habitat for malaria-bearing mosquitoes
Hmm, I haven't heard about any malaria outbreaks in Spain.
the eastern Mediterranean will be as hot as the Sahara desert, flash floods will swamp parts of the American coastline and there will be almost no snow in the Alps.
Um...nope.
Meanwhile, some islands in the Maldives could disappear as they are submerged by rising sea levels.
Let me check. No, the Maldives are still there.
Areas such as the Mediterranean - a popular destination for British tourists - could become unbearable during the traditional summer holiday season. As temperatures begin to soar, many tourists will stay away.
No, the Mediterranean is still a popular destinations for British tourists, and I haven't heard anyone saying the temperatures are unbearable.
Winter tourism will be affected in the Alps and other European skiing destinations from the impact of less snowfall and shorter skiing seasons
My brother just got back from a skiing holiday in the Alps. He had a great time. You know, because it was all still covered in snow. If it wasn't covered in snow his skiing holiday would have been a bit shit.
So, that was all bullshit from the "scientists" at the University of East Anglia. Of course, they're not actually scientists, just Marxists using environmentalism as a front to push a socialist agenda and increase immigration for "climate refuges." Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabart, gave the game away when he said [nationalreview.com] about the Green New Deal, "The interesting thing about the Green New Deal is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all. Do you guys think of it as a climate thing? Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing." It would apparently advance "social, economic, racial, regional and gender-based justice and equality and cooperative and public ownership." Once again, we see that environmentalism is just socialism by the back door.
Anyway, I'll see you boys in 2050 when we can look back at this article and have a good laugh. Assuming we're not living in some sort of Marxist nightmare by then.
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It's a catch 22, pollution causes Global Dimming, which partially counteracts global warming. As bad as pollution is, it has the one side effect.
Re:Green 101 - Always Make Far Flung Predictions (Score:4, Insightful)
You really should read the cited report instead of the newspaper's highly sensationalized version of it. The report itself is actually quite tame.
I don't think you should use newspaper headlines as proof of anything other than the fact that newspapers will say anything to make a buck!
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The annual "Flying Man of Southampton" competition that the internet hasn't heard of? Cancelled because the water levels would mean it's safer than it used to be?
It's almost as though you're making shit up.
The sad part... (Score:4, Insightful)
Our politics are so divisive this is now a discussion of whether to spend 83 billion or whether this is all made up BS.
Why can't we all decide things such as "clean fresh water is good for us" and spend what it takes to provide it?
Or having a standing grove of trees is better than another office park and strip mall?
Or having cleaner air makes us healthier? Or sustainable food sources are better than cows packed into tiny cages?
Or have homes without lead poisoning from the city's pipes?
We don't have to take a big 83 billion dollar hit at one time or face immediate annihilation.
We could pick just one of these issues, agree that it would help us, our children and our planet, deal with the cost impacts, then when the issue is resolved, we pick another.
We didn't get in this mess overnight, and nor will we be able to get ourselves out of this mess overnight either.
You deal with it the same way you eat an elephant; one bite at a time.
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And you wonder where the problem is...
The question is, will our descendants remember? (Score:5, Interesting)
We've *already* have destroyed much of the ecological wealth of the country; we just moved onto substitutes.
Up until WW2, people didn't eat chickens much. Chickens were for laying eggs and were too scrawny to be good eating. The most common, meat on American's tables from colonial times until the late 1800s was pigeon -- specifically *passenger pigeon*.
Larger than the more familiar city pigeon, passenger pigeons darkened the skies in flocks measuring hundreds of square miles. When they were migrating you didn't aim at them. You must pointed your gun in the air and fired until you were out of ammunition, then picked up the birds and packed them in a barrel of salt. Trade passenger pigeons spurred the development of railroads in remote areas. In one town in then near-wilderness Michigan packed 50,000 birds a day, every day, for five months out of the year.
Similar stories can be told of anadromous fish runs like shad or salmon, which provided protein to coastal populations from colonial times until the rivers were dammed for mills in the 1800s. While reduced runs still occur on some larger rivers, many small local runs were finished off by pollution in the 1950s and 60s.
Same story for native trout. In my neck of the woods fisherman their are still fishermen who remember catching brook trout in local rivers in the early 60s. By the end of the decade pollution had wiped out the wild population. Today the streams are too warm for brook trout to spawn; all we get are rainbows, a fine game fish in its native range but out of a hatchery as dumb as a brick.
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The passenger pigeon is an interesting edge case. Normally when a game species approaches being hunted out, the last remaining individuals hide in the least successful places. If humanity still wants to hunt them, we have to develop ways of farming them and maintaining a sustainable population. That is why we still have trout and bison.
The passenger pigeon was unique in being sustainable only in large colonies. As soon as any colony population dropped below a certain level that could not have been knowable
Climate breakdown? (Score:3)
Who do we pay the tax to? The federal gov so it can fund experts?
Experts who will tell us all about "climate breakdown"? They need the money to educate everyone globally:
The UN?
An actor?
A think tank?
Some NGO?
A social media company.
A browser company.
An ad company.
Some very wealthy philanthropist who has direct views on the tax rate and who should get a lot of direct payments from a climate tax fund?
Some random person from an EU nation?
So many nice people need support to tell the world about how bad the USA is and what the bad US did to the good "climate" and good "nature"...
China is doing far worse but US is the problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
Based article.
false equivalency (Score:2)
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The report is not just about global warming, and it is about 2050.
Global warming lags ~30 years behind carbon emissions. The warming we have had so far is the result of emissions up to 1990s. The warming we will have from now up to ~2050 is the result of emissions from 1990s to now. There is nothing we can do about that. But we can choose to not make it even worse.
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Global warming lags ~30 years behind carbon emissions. The warming we have had so far is the result of emissions up to 1990s. The warming we will have from now up to ~2050 is the result of emissions from 1990s to now. There is nothing we can do about that. But we can choose to not make it even worse.
Sure. And the warming from 1850 to 1880 was caused by the emissions from the 1820s. And the warming from 1880 to 1910 was caused by......oh, wait........
http://www.woodfortrees.org/pl... [woodfortrees.org]
Re:China is doing far worse but US is the problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
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In the US, the sentiment from a significant portion of the population and the government seems to be "eh, it's fine". While we have made some strides (when it's profitable) there are other areas where a country of our wealth should not have. Chemicals in the water supply, illegal dumping, single use containers, even our crapp
TAKE THAT!! (Score:2)
Take that, nature!
Reaction of the usual person in power (Score:2)
"2050? I'll be dead by then, why should I give a shit?"
If you want to fix the ecological problem, increase life expectancy.
And so (Score:2)
And yet environmental problem prevention ideas are promoted as business opportunities.
It's all needless money, just one is forced by nature, the other by government.
It's important, but what a stupid argument... (Score:3)
Look, the environment is pretty important. After all, we live in it, we ought to care.
But this argument? "the global annual GDP could, instead, grow $11 billion by 2050"
The global economy could grow $11 billion over 30 years, or $300M per year? The global GDP is $80 trillion, so we're talking about a difference of 3/800000. That's not even a rounding error, that is literally nothing.
Trying to put this stuff into monetary terms is just laughable. I would expect better arguments from a kindergarten kid.
Coral reefs protect from flooding? (Score:2)
Impossible (Score:2)
Trump (Score:2)
Will obviously deny that claim and put anyone supporting it into jail.
fuck the future (Score:2)
Ecosystem services (Score:3)
The fact that we're still talking about the ecosystem as a series of services is part of the problem.
By 2050 we will have fixed all this.. (Score:3)
But those fixes will cause a bunch of new problems, maybe even worse than the ones being predicted.
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