In our culture, showing an oil-caked pelican drowning next to a melting glacier isn’t enough to capture our attention anymore. We’ll shake our heads, mutter, “That’s a shame,” then quickly click to “Survivor: Downtown Detroit.” We know we’re destroying the planet, but we also know that we’ll be OK for the rest of our lives. Eventually it will be our great-grandchildren’s problem, and then it will really be a shame—for them. To take our minds off the tragedy of it all, we hop into our 12-ton, six-wheeled SUV to drive the 0.11 miles to Starbucks, then order a mocha that didn’t harm a rainforest to make us feel a little better.
That’s why the recent release of the Stern Review Report actually caused a few raised eyebrows around the world. The 700-page report didn’t exactly go out on a limb, saying that climate change trending is leading to a lot of certain, bad things. Where the exhaustive report—lauded as a revolutionary and forward-thinking document compiled by former World Bank chief economist Sir Nicholas Stern—seized attention is when it correlated the issue into the impact it will have on the world’s economy. Now that it’s clear that it will be our leather wallets that will suffer and not just some unnamable Amazonian creature, our ears perk up.
The global gross domestic product was estimated at $60.7 trillion in 2005. Stern posits using one percent of this total to combat the issue of climate change. That’s a lot of clams, right? Not when you consider that his report concludes that this problem could lead to a 20-percent shrink in the global economy by 2050—a figure estimated to be $368 trillion. Stern even discusses a variety of intriguing ways of reducing emissions, including “taxes, regulation and emissions trading.”
Even though the only way things seem to make sense to us these days is if you put issues into the context of dollars and cents, you can pretty much write the world’s biggest polluter—the U.S.—out of the game until at least 2008, when we’ll finally see a change in administration and, hopefully, policy. “W” would rather cut his two-month vacations to one and use the extra month to enter spelling bees than to get on board with a change that would affect his oil cronies. In fact, I believe he’s already dispatched Dick Cheney to invite Sir Nicholas Stern on a “hunting trip” …
“What say, gov’nor? Where are the foxes and all that rot? If we don’t tarry, we can fancy a spot of tea before … Eh, Sir Dick … Why are you pointing that shotgun at me, good chum?”
So the choice becomes whether to spend a fraction of the money and energy on a collaborative effort to curb emissions now … or wait until we can enjoy something that will make the Great Depression look like a bad day selling lemonade on the corner.
“The task is urgent,” wrote Stern. “Delaying action even by a decade or two will take us into dangerous territory. We must not let this window of opportunity close. Government, businesses and individuals all need to work together to respond to the challenge.
“Strong, deliberate policy choices by governments are essential to motivate change.”
Powerful words. But just out of curiosity, when’s the last time you saw a successful policy choice by your government, especially on a global scale that involved working well with others? Right.
Better load up on the sunscreen and bury that piggy bank in the backyard now … I hear we’re headed for some warm weather.
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