This is a guest post by David Suzuki. 

Those who don’t outright deny the existence of human-caused global warming often argue we can’t or shouldn’t do anything about it because it would be too costly. Take Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who recently said, “No matter what they say, no country is going to take actions that are going to deliberately destroy jobs and growth in their country.”

But in failing to act on global warming, many leaders are putting jobs and economic prosperity at risk, according to recent studies. It’s suicidal, both economically and literally, to focus on the fossil fuel industry’s limited, short-term economic benefits at the expense of long-term prosperity, human health and the natural systems, plants and animals that make our well-being and survival possible. Those who refuse to take climate change seriously are subjecting us to enormous economic risks and foregoing the numerous benefits that solutions would bring.

The World Bank — hardly a radical organization — is behind one study. While still viewing the problem and solutions through the lens of outmoded economic thinking, its report demolishes arguments made by the likes of Stephen Harper.

“Climate change poses a severe risk to global economic stability,” said World Bank Group president Jim Yong Kim in a news release, adding, “We believe it’s possible to reduce emissions and deliver jobs and economic opportunity, while also cutting health care and energy costs.”

Risky Business, a report by prominent U.S. Republicans and Democrats, concludes, “The U.S. economy faces significant risks from unmitigated climate change,” especially in coastal regions and agricultural areas.

We’re making the same mistake with climate change we made leading to the economic meltdown of 2008, according to Henry Paulson, who served as treasury secretary under George W. Bush and sponsored the U.S. bipartisan report with former hedge fund executive Thomas Steyer and former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg. “But climate change is a more intractable problem,” he argued in the New York Times. “That means the decisions we’re making today — to continue along a path that’s almost entirely carbon-dependent — are locking us in for long-term consequences that we will not be able to change but only adapt to, at enormous cost.”

Both studies recommend carbon pricing as one method to address the climate crisis, with the World Bank arguing for “regulations, taxes, and incentives to stimulate a shift to clean transportation, improved industrial energy efficiency, and more energy efficient buildings and appliances.” 

Contrast that with Harper and Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s recent mutual back-patting in Ottawa. Appearing oblivious to the reality of global warming and economic principles, both rejected the idea of a “job-killing carbon tax.”

One Risky Business author, former Clinton treasury secretary Robert Rubin, also warned about the economic risks of relying on “stranded assets” — resources that must stay in the ground if we are to avoid dangerous levels of climate change, including much of the bitumen in Canada’s tar sands.

In a commentary in Nature, a multidisciplinary group of economists, scientists and other experts called for a moratorium on all oil sands expansion and transportation projects such as pipelines because of what they described in a news release as the “failure to adequately address carbon emissions or the cumulative effect of multiple projects.” They want “Canada and the United States to develop a joint North American road map for energy development that recognizes the true social and environmental costs of infrastructure projects as well as account for national and international commitments to reduce carbon emissions.”

Those who fear or reject change are running out of excuses as humanity runs out of time. Pitting the natural environment against the human-invented economy and placing higher value on the latter is foolish. These reports show it’s time to consign that false dichotomy to the same dustbin as other debunked and discredited rubbish spread by those who profit from sowing doubt and confusion about global warming.

“Climate inaction inflicts costs that escalate every day,” World Bank Group vice-president Rachel Kyte said, adding its study “makes the case for actions that save lives, create jobs, grow economies and, at the same time, slow the rate of climate change. We place ourselves and our children at peril if we ignore these opportunities.”

If our leaders can’t comprehend that, let’s find some who can.

Written with Contributions from David Suzuki Foundation Senior Editor Ian Hanington.

Learn more at www.davidsuzuki.org.

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Aggressively tackling global warming through better public transportation and increased energy efficiencies could increase global GDP by between $1.8 trillion and $2.6 trillion annually, a new report has found.

Released on Monday, the report by the World Bank and the ClimateWorks Foundation said tackling global warming now would also save as many as 94,000 lives a year from pollution-related diseases and reduce crop losses.

The report — Climate-Smart Development: Adding Up the Benefits of Actions that Help Build Prosperity, End Poverty and Combat Climate Change — shows the potential gains from scaling up pro-climate policies.

“The report’s findings show clearly that the right policy choices can deliver significant benefits to lives, jobs, crops, energy, and GDP — as well as emissions reductions to combat climate change,” World Bank President Jim Yong Kim said.

Written in advance of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s Climate Summit in New York in September, the report looks at benefits that ambitious climate mitigation policies can generate across the transportation, industry and building sectors, as well as in waste and cooking fuels. It focuses on Brazil, China, India, Mexico, the United States and the European Union.

By 2030, the report said, pro-climate government policies on clean transport and improved energy efficiency in factories, buildings and appliances could increase global GDP growth by an estimated $1.8 trillion to $2.6 trillion a year.                                                                  

Those policies could prevent the production of greenhouse gas emissions roughly equivalent to taking two billion cars off the road, the report said, while accounting for 30 per cent of the total emissions reduction needed in 2030 to limit global warming to two degrees Celsius.

“This report shows that well-designed climate mitigation efforts can result in important economic and social benefits, and provides a frameworks for assessing those benefits,” ClimateWorks Foundation president Charlotte Pera said.

Meanwhile, another major study published Tuesday showed that the U.S. economy already faces multiple and significant risks from climate change.

The study — Risky Business: The Economic Risks of Climate Change to the United States — said it's clear that staying on the current business-as-usual path will only increase the nation’s exposure to climate-change-related risks.

“The U.S. climate is paying the price today for business decisions made many years ago, especially through increased coastal storm damage and more extreme heat in parts of the country,” the study said.

“Every year that goes by without a comprehensive public and private sector response to climate change is a year that locks in future climate events that will have a far more devastating effect on our local, regional and national economies.”

Former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson and Tom Steyer, retired founder of Farallon Capital Management, co-chaired the Risky Business project.

“Damages from storms, flooding and heat waves are already costing local economies billions of dollars — we saw that firsthand in New York City with Hurricane Sandy,” Bloomberg said in a statement. “With the oceans rising and the climate changing, the Risky Business report details the costs of inaction in ways that are easy to understand in dollars and cents — and impossible to ignore.”

Concurring, Paulson said the U.S. economy is vulnerable to an overwhelming number of risks from climate change.

“If we act immediately, we can still avoid most of the worst impacts of climate change and significantly reduce the odds of catastrophic outcomes — but the investments we’re making today will determine our economic future,” Paulson said.

Steyer said climate change is nature’s way of charging the nation compound interest for doing the wrong thing.

“The longer we wait to address the growing risks of climate change, the more it will cost us all. From a business perspective, given the many benefits of early action, it would be silly to allow these risks to accumulate to the point where we can no longer manage them,” he said.

Looking at climate impacts from now to 2100, the study notes that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases can stay in the atmosphere for hundreds or even thousands of years, leading to higher temperatures, higher sea levels and shifts in global weather patterns.

“By not acting to lower greenhouse gas emissions today, decision-makers put in place processes that increase overall risks tomorrow, and each year those decision-makers fail to act serves to broaden and deepen those risks,” the study warned.

Photo by kaffeeeinstein

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Nicholas Stern, one of the world’s most influential economists, has come out with a new report showing that the future costs of climate change have been incredibly underestimated.

The report, Endogenous growth, convexity of damages and climate risk, indicates it is even more important than previously thought that politicians quickly and aggressively stop unchecked climate change caused by man-made carbon dioxide emissions.

Stern, a professor at the Grantham Institute at the London School of Economics, and his co-author Simon Dietz found that the current economic models used to calculate the cost of climate change are vastly inadequate and need to be updated so that proper decisions can be made about risks associated with global warming.

They said that even the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has cited the existing economic models and, as a result, has arrived at severely limited assumptions about the costs of global warming.

“It is extremely important to understand the severe limitations of standard economic models, such as those cited in the IPCC report, which have made assumptions that simply do not reflect current knowledge about climate change and its potential impacts on the economy,” Stern, a former chief economist with the World Bank, said in a media release.

“I hope our paper will prompt other economists to strive for much better models which will help policy-makers and the public to recognize the immensity [of] the potential risks of unmanaged climate change. Models that assume that catastrophic damages are not possible fail to take account of the magnitude of the issues and the implications of the science.”

The media release said Monday that Stern and Dietz modified some key features of the ‘dynamic integrated climate-economy,’ or DICE, model, which was initially devised by William Nordhaus in the 1990s, to take into account the latest findings and some of the uncertainties about the major risks of climate change that are usually omitted.

The new model allows a wider range of values to be considered for climate sensitivity, which is the long-term change in global average temperature that would result from a doubling of the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, the release says. 

The new model also includes a broader range of potential climate impacts, because the standard model tends to underestimate the potential economic damage that could be created by climate change, it added.

Dietz said the old economic model has been useful for economists who estimate the potential impacts of climate change but that the new model shows that some major improvements are needed before it can reflect the extent of the risks indicated by the science.

“Our aim was to show how a new version of the model could produce a range of results that are much more representative of the science and economics of climate change, taking into account the uncertainties,” Dietz said.

“The new version of this standard economic model, for instance, suggests that the risks from climate change are bigger than portrayed by previous economic models and therefore strengthens the case for strong cuts in emissions of greenhouse gases.”

Stern and Dietz said their research suggests a global carbon price should range from US $32 to $103/tCO2 by 2015 and rise to between $82 and $260/tCO2 by 2035.

They also found that that living standards could begin to decline later this century unless the growth in annual emissions of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels is checked. Their peer-reviewed paper is scheduled for publication in The Economic Journal.

Image Credit: Stern at the 2009 World Economic Forum via Flickr.

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Government records newly released under access to information legislation say that Canada supports carbon pricing as part of a global climate change strategy.

Mike De Souza writes for Postmedia News, that the documents "come from the Privy Council Office and Environment Canada, and they contrast with Prime Minister Stephen Harper's public criticism of carbon taxes."

As De Souza explains, the Privy Council Office (PCO) is "the central department in the government that supports the prime minister's office."

The PCO notes were reportedly prepared for the November 2011 G20 summit attended by Harper a month before Canada's pullout from the Kyoto Protocol. They highlight the World Bank's recommendation for "putting a price on carbon for developed countries," and comment that "Canada could support other countries implementing this proposal."

The PCO records also say that "Canada supports the development of new market-based mechanisms that expand the scale and scope of carbon markets." De Souza adds that the records suggest Canada "wanted to expand markets that require polluters to pay and allow other companies to profit from deploying technologies or other methods to reduce emissions in the atmosphere."

The Environment Canada documents were notes given to Deputy Environment Minister Bob Hamilton after he was appointed in July 2012, briefing him on the potential for job creation and economic growth in a strong climate change strategy.

The notes say that a "well-designed environmental policy, including GHG emission reduction policies, can also support economic objectives, in areas such as innovation, improved energy and resource productivity, and opportunities in global clean technology markets."

The briefing observes that "environmental damage and natural resource degradation can have important economic costs" in addition to posing "serious" and "significant impacts on human health and safety…and ecosystems in Canada and throughout the world."

Environment Minister Leona Aglukkaq's spokeswoman told Postmedia News "that the government does not support a carbon tax," reiterated the Harper government's position "that an NDP climate change proposal from the last election to raise billions of dollars by auctioning of pollution permits as part of a market-based carbon pricing scheme — was a tax on gas, groceries, electricity and everything else."

Aglukkaq's office said Canada is "playing a leadership role in addressing climate change."

De Souza writes that despite all major Canadian federal political parties supporting carbon pricing in the 2008 federal elections, "the Conservatives later decided to favour binding regulations in each industrial sector instead, because of the failure of the U.S. Congress to pass legislation creating a carbon market."

Several provinces have implemented their own forms of carbon pricing or taxes on greenhouse gas emissions, such as British Columbia's highly-successful tax on buying or using fuel.

The Environment Canada briefing notes suggested Canada inteded to meet its "GHG emission reduction target of 17% under 2005 levels by 2020," especially with "greater international pressure to demonstrate concrete action and to outline how Canada's national emissions targets will be met." A new report from Environmental Defence shows Canada cannot, however, met its emission reduction targets given current planned expansion in the tar sands – Canada's fastest source of growing GHGs.

Image Credit: Prime Minister's Office / Fickr

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