this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2023
15 points (94.1% liked)
Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.
5324 readers
327 users here now
Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.
As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:
Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm not an economist, but from my understanding, GDP isn't the end all be all if higher is better. It doesn't measure how much wealth you keep. It doesn't measure the utility of what is produced. Say we both have crotch kicking businesses. I go to you as a private individual, pay you $100 to kick my in the testicles, and then you come to my business as a private individual for the same service. We just made the GDP go up $200, and all we got out of it was sore genitals. Both of us are actually poorer because we will pay taxes one that money.
What does this have to do with climate? Say we replace all fossil fuels with renewables in a made up country on January of next year. We used to spend $1 trillion a year on fossil fuels. We spent 2 trillion on renewables, so our GDP went up that year by that trillion. A year later, it goes down by 1.5 trillion because we didn't have to buy oil. We are still better off than last year because we kept more of what we produced.