Good morning John.
Last year I made a video about how
Game of Thrones can be seen as an allegory
for climate change. And it included this line
“cimate change is literally the first global
scale collective problem our species
has ever faced.” And OH GOD.
So that made me think a couple of things.
One was, is it really? Is it really?
Like cancer is a global scale collective
problem kind of. So is nuclear proliferation.
Poverty. But I guess it depends on what I meant by
“collective.” And since I’m me, I guess
I get to decide that. Maybe I mean by collective
that we all contribute to it. And we all can,
in however small a way, have an impact either
positive or negative on the problem through
our actions.
And through that lens maybe global warming is
the first large-scale collective problem the
world has ever faced. But if that is true,
then John, we’ve got a second. And we could have done
without a second!
There was some talk early on about how
COVID would be a positive for the environment.
Which I hated from the very beginning.
One thing that is often overlooked or not
talked about enough is that, like, overcoming
climate change is going to require prosperity.
It requires a world in which there is enough.
Both for people to be safe and happy,
and also for us to have the resources necessary
to free ourselves from the carbon economy.
And that’s a tall order because a lot of
our current happiness or safety and health
and prosperity relies on the carbon economy,
I’m sorry to say. That’s the situation.
Right now we are incapable of guaranteeing
people’s health and happiness without
spending extra resources on combating
climate change. We’re sitting here with a global
GDB for 2020 at -5%. That’s four trillion
dollars.
And here’s a wild thing, the UN’s upper
estimate for how much it would cost to fix climate
change?
4 trillion dollars per year. Yes, we are incurring
the costs of about ½ to 1 COVID epidemic
every year we do not tackle climate change. We have a
very big global, collective problem right now and we’re
spending a tremendous amount of resources, either
directly or through increased economic activity, on
that problem. As we should be.
And none of us know what the end result is
going to be. But it’s not hard to imagine that
there will be a fairly significant period
of slow,
or even declining economic growth. And while
that’s happening we won’t be focused on climate
change, which I understand. But we also just won’t
have the same level of resources we otherwise would
have had to help free ourselves from the carbon economy.
But also, I am seeing a clearer, brighter
light being shined on the dangers of all-out individualism.
Just as your freedom of expression doesn’t
always include the ability to not wear a mask in
certain places, our freedom to live however we want
in this world is going to be impinged upon by the
reality that living that way is going to long
term decrease our ability to live in the world.
And so yes there will be costs, just as there will
be costs to
combating this epidemic. They’re just much
less bad
than the cost of not doing anything.
We’ve watched, over the last 6 months, collective action
unlike anything I’ve ever seen in my lifetime.
Maybe anything ever. Are there some stand-out
crap faces? Yes. Do we know the ultimate 
impact of their
terrible behavior? Nope. We don’t, and we
may never.
But at least I have now seen a large scale
collective action of the kind if not the magnitude
necessary to take on climate change. And so, if I am
more fearful
because we’re headed into a less prosperous
world,
at least for now, I am also more hopeful.
Because I’ve seen that people can and do
make sacrifices when we see what’s really on
the line.
John, I’ll see you on Tuesday.
