As per the book,
'Climate Vulnerability Monitor: A Guide to the Cold Calculus of A Hot Planet',
the impacts of climate change and carbon intensive economy cost the world 1.6 percent of the total global GDP (gross domestic product).
The Stern review states that the cost of mitigating and adapting to climate
change (i.e if we take strong, sustained actions now) will cost us
approximately one percent of the total GDP each year, which is far less than
the five to 20 percent required to combat the consequences of global warming in
the future(delayed action). This review leads to a simple conclusion: “the
benefits of strong and early action far outweigh the economic costs of not
acting”.
When all these and
many more facets are so evident why are we still ignorant?Why don’t we realize
that there will be no earth left if we focus our attention to increasing GDP?
To conclude I would like to quote Mark Twain (taken from the
Inconvenient Truth), that what gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know
it’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.
Reference:
Climate Vulnerability
Monitor, DARA: http://daraint.org/
Why don’t we realize that there will be no earth left if we focus our attention to increasing GDP?
ReplyDeleteI'm really interested in this sort of stuff - personally I think cognitive dissonance has a part to play. But also, I think everyday people just have much more pressing concerns than reducing their carbon emissions. And rightly so. People are far more concerned with earning a living to feed their family than making sure they switch their lightbulbs. Can you really blame them?
This, I think, is why I think the government have got their emissions reduction focus wrong. The advocate individuals changing their habits. But that, in my opinion, is never going to happen.
Dear Stuart,
ReplyDeleteThank you for your comment, I was hoping someone would mention it. Yes I do agree that the general public has different priorities, but the Government is for the people and its time they understand that their focus needs to shift from increasing their GDP to implementing adaption strategies (which in the long run will increase their GDP sustainably). And only if the Government takes aggressive actions now will we have a better future. It will be extremely difficult to transform our consumption patterns,but we need to think of the long term consequences. And its not impossible, it has been done in the past (making CNG mandatory for the public transport).
As Hans mentioned on your blog about mandates, I agree with him. I do realize that the Ministers do have alot of "political" pressure, but I think this is where we step in, by supporting the right and making amendments.
This is a debatable topic that I am sure will interest many more which is why I will blog on similar issues in the future. We need to come up with easy and sustainable strategies (may have to include incentives, as in most cases it is incentive based participation)for the public (keeping in mind their priorities and the other socio-economic problems).
Thank you for your comment, its important that such topics be discussed repeatedly (from different angles) as one gets to learn about news ideas.
I do agree with both of you, but as long as, in my opinion, there is inequality in societies such as poverty, it's very difficult for them to concern about the environmental change.
ReplyDeleteBesides, I think there are still many people who think that it's not their responsibilities to make any concern or have to take care of the environment since this issue should belong to the government stuff, but in fact, the actions should start from a very small part to a bigger one, so we can't blame anyone because we are part of it.
For me, the best thing we can do is to make them-- normal people-- realize about the problem with concrete pictures that they won't have homes or even lives if we ignore this problem. I think that point may call for more attention to reduce emissions, change consumption patterns, or even take better and stronger actions from every part of the world than only from one single part like governments' actions.