Climate Change Portends Global Economic Meltdown

. . . from which recovery would be unlikely without seizing the business opportunity now to fast-track the transition to a non-carbon regenerative economy. That economy will maintain and enhance global ecological integrity and be wildly more productive, prosperous, and equitable, and capable of meeting the basic needs of the world's people. The climate crisis is the front line of the sustainability challenge, but the sustainability challenge is even larger. Fortunately, the needed responses to the sustainability challenge are the solution to the climate crisis.

The article ((excerpted below) describes the release of the Stern Report in October 2006. Go to: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2006/oct/26/topstories3.politics. The report is available at Amazon: The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review. An Interview with Stern before the report, along with biographical information is available (click here).

Tackle climate change or face deep recession, world's leaders warned
· Economic review turns cost argument on head
· Technologies investment 'could stimulate growth'

By James Randerson, science correspondent.
The Guardian, Thursday 26 October 2006

Climate change could tilt the world's economy into the worst global recession in recent history, a report will warn next week.

Sir Nicholas Stern, a former chief economist with the World Bank, will warn that governments need to tackle the problem head-on by cutting emissions or face economic ruin. The findings, due to be released on Monday, will turn economic argument about global warming on its head by insisting that fighting global warming will save industrial nations money. The US refused to join the Kyoto protocol, the international agreement on greenhouse gas emissions, because George Bush said it would harm the economy.

. . . Speaking at a climate change conference in Birmingham, he said: "All of [Stern's] detailed modelling out to the year 2100 is going to indicate first of all that if we don't take global action we are going to see a massive downturn in global economies." He added: "If no action is taken we will be faced with the kind of downturn that has not been seen since the great depression and the two world wars." [this is actually an understatement; recovery from the economic meltdown is highly unlikely].  Sir David called the review "the most detailed economic analysis that I think has yet been conducted".

. . . The International Energy Agency predicts that $15 trillion (£8 trillion) of investment in new energy sources will be required over the next 15 years. "The massive investment programme that's ahead of us is an opportunity for us to move towards a zero carbon energy system. The investment process is going to act quite possibly in the opposite direction to an economic downturn," Sir David said.

. . . He told the Rapid Climate Change conference, organised by the Natural Environment Research Council in Birmingham, that achieving global political consensus would be extremely difficult. "In my view this is the biggest challenge our global political system has ever been faced with. We've never been faced with a decision where collective decision making is required by all major countries." The timescale too is unprecedented. "Actions being asked of the political system today are only going to play through into mid-century and beyond. So for the first time we are asking a global political system to make decisions around risks to their populations that are well outside the time period of any election process."

. . . He drew parallels between scientific advice on global warming and advice from seismologists ahead of the Boxing Day tsunami. A month before the disaster a delegation warned governments around the Indian ocean about the extreme danger posed by tectonic activity under the sea. No government chose to act on the advice. "$30m as the cost to install some kind of early warning system presumably looked like a lot of money." But such a system could have saved 150,000 lives.