By Tim Sylvia
On May 6, 2007, long after the decade-to-decade-and-a-half run of dominance the show bearing his namesake experienced, Homer J.Simpson uttered modern philosophy’s greatest question:
“I’ve got three kids and no money. Why can’t I have no kids and three money?”
The point of the quote? Responsibility is expensive. the greater your responsibility, the more likely it is to cost you a pretty penny. Well, while the sentiment may not be shared by all of our citizens, we in the United States have a responsibility to do our part to save the planet that we have worked so diligently to destroy, especially so in the last 150 or so years.
Now, we have a price tag for that responsibility, as Wood Mackenzie has released a report titled Deep decarbonization requires deep pockets which outlines the $4.5 trillion cost to fully decarbonize the U.S. power grid by 2030.
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As relayed earlier, Wood Mackenzie estimated this 11-year decarbonization cost to be $4.5 trillion. That kind of spending over a decade is unfathomable, unless you look at annual military spending, there’s no way it could be worth the cost, right?
Well, that’s something Amir Jina of the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago addresses in an article for Forbes: Will Global Warming Shrink U.S. GDP 10%?
The article was written in response the collective freakout over a graph in the last chapter of the most recent National Climate Assessment. The graph predicts that if the United States were to do absolutely nothing about climate change by the end of the century (assuming we’d live to see it), and have a warming of 15°F above pre-industrial levels, that could “knock as much as 10 percent off the size of America’s economy by century’s end.”
Continue reading at PV Magazine…