Is $38 trillion a lot?

Because that's what we're throwing away

A new study released today in Nature examines data from 1,600 regions of the earth for the last forty years, and concludes that by 2050 climate change will be causing economic damage worth $38 trillion every single year. That seems like…a lot. The entire world economy at the moment is about $100 trillion a year; the federal budget is about $6 trillion a year. $38 trillion is 150 Bezoses (which is sick in its own way).

If those numbers seem impossible to comprehend, then let Bloomberg break it down for you, “planetary warming will result in an income reduction of 19% globally by mid-century, compared to a global economy without climate change.”

This is the largest study of this kind I know of; it comes from the Potsdam Institute in Germany, and as James Murray, writing in BusinessGreen points out, it’s more “granular and empirical” than past efforts. It concludes that these losses are already locked in, thanks to the carbon and methane we’ve already poured into the air.

"Strong income reductions are projected for the majority of regions, including North America and Europe, with South Asia and Africa being most strongly affected," said PIK scientist and co-author of the study, Maximilian Kotz. "These are caused by the impact of climate change on various aspects that are relevant for economic growth such as agricultural yields, labour productivity or infrastructure… We find that economies across the world are committed to an average income loss of 19 per cent by 2049 due to past emissions. This corresponds to a 17 per cent reduction in global GDP."

If anything, as Murray points out, the numbers are quite likely conservative.

The projected damages are mainly the result of rising average temperatures and changes in rainfall and temperature variability. But other weather extremes that are harder to model, such as storms or wildfires, could result in higher economic costs. The study also assumes that over time economies start to adapt to more intense climate impacts, serving to curb the resulting negative economic impacts. As climate scientists have repeatedly warned, there are plausible scenarios where some regions find it near impossible to adapt and development is thrown into reverse. Such outcomes would trigger huge geo-political risks that could impact the entire global economy.

What might cause even deeper problems? Just for fun, read another European study from last week, on the rapid slowdown in the Atlantic ocean circulation and the possible looming shutdown of the entire system.

Oh, and if we don’t take strong action now to limit the rise in temperature, then the economic losses just keep growing—that 19 percent at mid-century becomes 60 percent by 2100, when people currently being born will still be alive, and cursing us.

There are a couple of things to say here.

One, some of you may remember the famous Limits to Growth report from the early 1970s. It predicted that without serious efforts to change our demands on the planet, economic growth would begin to suffer right about now. We thought about it as a society and then, with the election of Ronald Reagan, rejected it; we are now harvesting that bitter fruit. If we don’t act now then our children may wish they still had bitter fruit to harvest.

Two, capitalism—which regularly acts homicidally—is acting truly suicidally. Having been warned for years now, it resists every effort to rein in its excesses. As Exxon’s CEO helpfully explained earlier this year, it’s not that you couldn’t make good money from renewable energy—you just couldn’t make ‘above average returns’ because sunshine is free. So instead we’ll tank the world, and with it the world economy (which is a subset of the first, not the other way round).

In Europe, for instance, climate protest has finally persuaded regulators to start slowing loans to the fossil fuel industry—but new data this week makes it clear that the slack is being taken up by American banks, and not just the mighty money center banks that are already most deeply implicated in this immoral trade. Now regional banks are taking it up too:

Some of the US regional banks stepping up oil, gas and coal lending are based in states that have either passed or are reviewing anti-ESG laws. In Oklahoma, which enforced its Energy Discrimination Elimination Act in late 2022, local bank BOK Financial recently soared up the league table to become one of the world’s 30 busiest dealmakers in fossil fuels.

Marisol Salazar, senior vice president and manager for energy banking at BOK Financial, says the bank is now seeing “much more opportunities” in the fossil-fuel industry.

“We’re not just picking up customers,” she said. “We’re also picking up talent, we’re picking up engineers, we’re picking up investment bankers, we’re picking up experienced relationship managers.”

All of this makes even more important the release of the Carbon Bankroll 2.0 report earlier this spring. You’ll recall the first version of this report a year ago, which made it clear that for many companies—Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and on and on— the bulk of their carbon emissions came from the cash they kept in the bank, where it got lent out to build more fossil fuel infrastructure. That’s because, as the new report makes clear,

If the largest banks and asset managers in the U.S. were a country, they would be the third-largest emitting country in the world, behind China and the U.S.

So let’s think about this for a moment. If Amazon and Apple and Microsoft wanted to avoid a world where, by century’s end, people had 60 percent less money to spend on buying whatever phones and software and weird junk (doubtless weirder by then) they plan on selling, then they should be putting pressure on their banks to stop making the problem worse. They should also be unleashing their lobbying teams to demand climate action from Congress.

These people are supposed to care about money, and for once it would help us if they actually did. Stop putting out ads about how green your products are—start making this system you dominate actually work.

This is not a radical proposition. A radical—and probably wise, if unlikely—proposition would be get past capitalism. But for the moment this is where we are, and the people who dominate it have an obligation to make it work, if only out of their own sad self-interest.

Here’s how the unradical Todd Stern—longtime American climate negotiator at international talks—put it in a quite powerful speech he gave last week in the UK:

“We are slowed down by those who think of themselves as grownups and believe decarbonisation at the speed the climate community calls for is unrealistic.”

“They say that we need to slow down, that what is being proposed [in cuts to greenhouse gas emissions] is unrealistic,” he told the Observer. “You see it a lot in the business world too. It’s really hard [to push for more urgency] because those ‘grownups’ have a lot of influence.”

Stern says that the ‘grownups’ will only listen when the rest of us push.

The original Earth Day in 1970 happened in a societal moment that isn’t easily replicated, but it does teach that there is still more to do in filling the streets and campuses with young people and people young at heart who see the danger of climate change for what it is.

What that original Earth Day represented was not just norm change but a sociopolitical tipping point in environmental concern—the kind of positive tipping point we need to reach on climate change as well. And it will come. But it has to be our collective mission to make it come sooner.

Indeed! Watch this space.

In other energy and climate news:

+If for some reason you fail to be adequately motivated by money, here’s something else that is happening already and will get much worse by 2050 unless we act: people dying from breathing wildfire smoke:

We project that climate-driven increases in future smoke PM2.5 could result in 27,800 excess deaths per year by 2050 under a high warming scenario, a 76% increase relative to estimated 2011-2020 averages. Cumulative excess deaths from wildfire smoke PM2.5 could exceed 700,000 between 2025-2055. When monetized, climate-induced smoke deaths result in annual damages of $244 billion by mid-century, comparable to the estimated sum of all other damages in the US in prior analyses.

+Climate played a huge role in this month’s South Korean elections, Bloomberg reports—and it wasn’t a divisive one:

“Climate change is like a must-have item on your agenda if you are a politician in the modern world,” said Kim Soo Jin, a visiting professor at Dankook University’s graduate school of carbon neutrality. “For this to have any long-term, meaningful impact, these candidates need to prove that they have very specific climate-related policy plans.”

The main conservative People Power Party and the main opposition progressive Democratic Party launched unprecedented searches to recruit candidates with climate expertise to run for seats under their banner.

Meanwhile, in America’s electoral system, the former president took time out from glowering at jurors to tell a bunch of rich people that he will shut down windpower as soon as he gets back in. Speaking to oil and gas execs at a fundraising extravaganza, he was his usual sane self.

“I hate wind,” Trump told the executives over a meal of chopped steak at his Mar-a-Lago Club and resort in Florida, according to a person with knowledge of the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation.

Trump’s comments reveal how he is wooing potential donors with his long-standing hostility to wind farms and pledges to halt this form of renewable energy if he returns to office. His stance poses a potential threat to one of the linchpins of America’s clean-energy transition, according to more than a dozen Trump allies, energy experts and offshore wind industry officials.

+A really important new toolkit from 350.org to help local communities with the struggle to win local control over new renewable energy installations—which, among other things, would make it much easier to site new sun and wind installations.

The road to Our Own Power is not always easy. It takes time to build connections in many of our communities. There are technical and financial challenges — the tips in this booklet can help. And there may be national or local regulation that cannot be overcome by a single community effort. Like in Turkey, cooperatives preparing to build out solar projects found burdensome regulatory hurdles. So they are tackling not only the task of building a community plan but also bigger policy battles. Find other allies and network on the Our Own Power website.

Creating these community energy projects has huge benefits. Communities get cheaper, stable electricity. Projects generate positive health impacts — reducing pollution from diesel generators or coal-fired power plants. The community is stronger, more educated, and grows in its sense of pride.

+New episodes coming from As She Rises, a remarkable podcast that brings together a poet and an activist from a local community to tell the story of ongoing resistance!

+Fascinating essay from Gabrielle Kuiper on the fossil fuel industry as a gaslighting and abusive domestic partner

People only leave abusive relationships when they have support, some level of realisation that they’ve been trapped, and somewhere else to go. Photographer Nan Goldin looked at the photos she’d taken of her bruises to remind herself never to return to her battering boyfriend.

There is somewhere else we can go: renewable energy, electric bicycles, we don’t need clothes made out of plastic. We can build twenty-storey buildings out of reinforced wood. We can make steel in electric arc furnaces. We can grow more trees than we cut down.

+Grist, the invaluable environmental magazine, said its most enjoyable interview of the year was with my wonderful colleague Lani Ritter Hall

“For the first time in 76 years, I was out on the street with a sign in front of a bank in Cleveland, Ohio,” she told me. “It was like, Oh, my gosh, am I really doing this? Yes, you are!”

+Average sea surface temperatures topped 21 degrees C for the first time in March. This is not good news

"The changes are happening so fast that we are not able to keep pace with the impact," the executive secretary of UNESCO's intergovernmental oceanographic commission, Vidar Helgesen, told AFP on the sidelines of the three-day "Ocean Decade" conference in Barcelona.

"It calls for a much stronger effort to observe and research in real time and a much closer collaboration between science and policy making," he said, adding that "tackling ocean warming is a burning issue".

The gathering, which ended Friday, brought together around 1,500 scientists and representatives of governments and environmental organizations to discuss protection of oceans.

Oceans cover 70 percent of the planet and have kept the Earth's surface liveable by absorbing 90 percent of the excess heat produced by carbon pollution from human activity since the dawn of the industrial age.

+Such kudos to Dayenu, and everyone else who worked to make Reform Judaism the first Jewish denomination to divest from fossil fuels!

“When we act together, we can help care for the earth as Adam and Eve did in the Garden of Eden. And we can care for our financial health, recognizing that fossil-free portfolios over time perform equal to or slightly better than those holding fossil fuels,” Rabbi Jonah Pesner, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, said in a statement. 

Jennifer Brodkey Kaufman, URJ North American board chair, added: “Climate change’s impacts are being felt in communities worldwide. We have the ability and responsibility to use our dollars to make a positive difference on climate, rather than to continue funding investment in damaging fossil fuels. Through this resolution, which was crafted by the Commission on Social Action of Reform Judaism before being adopted by the URJ, we can build on decades of past action and advocacy on climate and socially responsible investing.” 

+Gaining momentum: the Plant-Based Treaty, which would “put food systems at the heart of combating the climate crisis, aiming to halt the widespread degradation of critical ecosystems caused by animal agriculture, to promote a shift to more healthy, sustainable plant-based diets and to actively reverse damage done to planetary functions, ecosystem services and biodiversity.” As the Times explained earlier this winter, the cities that are endorsing it aren’t banning meat, just asking residents to eat more plants.

The first municipality to sign on was Boynton Beach, Fla., in September 2021. “It’s about raising awareness around individual choices and the benefits of eating more plants,” said Rebecca Harvey, the city’s former sustainability coordinator.

Twenty-five other municipalities have since joined, including Los Angeles, Amsterdam and more than a dozen cities in India.

Amsterdam spokesman Rory van den Bergh said the city is trying to change eating habits and is aiming for 60 percent of the protein consumed by residents to come from plants by 2030.

+Andrew Dessler, always a useful analyst, crunches some of the latest numbers on the eternal questions of how large a role nuclear power will play going forward.

The central issue with nuclear power is its cost. Constructing nuclear power costs approximately $10,000 per kilowatt of capacity. This is ten times as expensive as solar and wind, which cost around $1,000 per kW.

+Arielle Samuelson and Emily Atkin, at the venerable Heated substack, have a sad account of how the fossil fuel industry is buying its way into various civil rights campaigns. In this case, four of their paid shills were onstage with Rev. Al Sharpton, pitching natural gas in front of a banner about ‘speaking truth to power.’ Ugh. Jacqui Patterson first revealed this kind of manipulation in 2019 when she was at the NAACP; it’s just one more ugly strategy from Big Oil

+New evidence that airborne pollutants drive dementia and cognitive decline (which, if you think about it, may explain some of this whole newsletter…)

Untangling the relationship between air pollution and the brain is complex. In the modern industrial world, we are all exposed to literally thousands of contaminants. And not every person exposed to a given pollutant will develop the same set of symptoms, impairments, or diseases—in part because of their genes, and in part because each exposure may occur at a different point in development or impact a different area of the body or brain. What’s more, social disparities are at play: Poorer populations almost always live closer to factories, toxins, and pollutants.

The effort to figure it out and intervene has sparked a new field of study: exposomics, the science of environmental exposures and their effects on health, disease, and development. Exposomics draws on enormous datasets about the distribution of environmental toxins, genetic and cellular responses, and human behavioral patterns. There is a huge amount of information to parse, so researchers in the field are turning to another emerging science, artificial intelligence, to make sense of it all.

“Anything from our external environment—the air we breathe, food we eat, the water we drink, the emotional stress that we face every day—all of that gets translated into our biology,” says Rosalind Wright, professor of pediatrics and co-director of the Institute for Exposomic Research at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. “All these things plus genes themselves explain the patterns of risk we see.” When an exposure is constant and cumulative, or when it overwhelms our ability to adapt, or “when you’re a fetus in utero, when you’re an infant or in early childhood or in a critical period of growth,” it can have a particularly powerful effect on lifelong cognitive clarity and brain health.

+Always nice to see a new entrant in the competition for world’s largest battery plant. But especially nice in this California case, since it’s been built on the site of a “failed gas plant.”

And there’s plenty of clean power to fill that big battery, because for the last few weeks California has been, for part of every single day, generating more power than it can use from sun and wind and water. Jeremiah Budin’s account quotes the reliable Stanford expert Mark Jacobson:

While California has hit 100% renewable energy before, for brief moments on exceptionally sunny days, this is the first time the state has sustained that success over an extended period. As Jacobson noted, there was even a portion of a recent day when wind, water, solar, and geothermal power (often shortened to the catchier "#WindWaterSolar" and #WWS hashtag) combined to reach 109% of the state's electricity demand, with anything unused going to battery storage.

Jacobson also pointed out how the date of the solar eclipse, April 8, showed a momentary dip when battery power jumped in to fill the gap in sunshine, before solar picked right back up where it left off and helped WWS to make its own eclipse — of the 100% mark.

+From one corner of the planet to the other:

In Brooklyn, a huge new apartment building opens, and it only uses electric power!

The 441 residences at 505 State Street—46 of which are ‘affordable housing’— are fitted with energy-efficient appliances, induction cooktops, in-home washer/dryers, air conditioning, smart controls for heating/cooling, and dishwashers. Residential amenities will include an attended lobby with 24/7 concierge, a package room, a product library, a gym with a yoga studio, a grow room, a workspace with a kitchen, multiple conference rooms, a children’s playroom, a lounge with a kitchen and outdoor terrace, a screening room, an outdoor rooftop pool and terrace with 360-degree views, rooftop cabanas with seating and grills, and a rooftop living room with full kitchen.

Meanwhile, in Cote d’Ivoire, the largest solar farm in West Africa has been inaugurated, with panels enough to serve 430,000 homes.

I’ve been to remote villages in the Ivory Coast, and seen what the first electricity can mean to people who’ve never had any. This matters.