The Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, which is backed by the German government, published a report in April 2024 stating that the cost of disregarding the pressing need for reducing CO2 emissions and fossil fuel burning at the global level will amount to $38 trillion per year starting in 2050. This figure represents an erosion of 17% of the total international GDP worldwide as a result of the climate system collapse caused by unabated global warming. These costs will manifest in the form of a decline in agricultural production, the loss of infrastructure due to rising sea levels, and a decrease in human productivity as people become unable to work in many parts of the world due to unbearable heat. Moreover, these costs are projected to increase, leading to a 60% decrease in the international total GDP by the end of the century, when the global temperature is expected to rise by 4°C above pre-Industrial Revolution levels.
The same report added that the cost of implementing economic changes at the global level to reduce fossil fuel burning to a level that prevents global warming from exceeding 2°C above pre-Industrial Revolution temperatures will be approximately $6 trillion. This amount would need to be spent between now and 2050.
In other words, the cost humanity must pay now to transition to renewable energy systems and wean itself off fossil fuels is around $6 trillion spread over 25 years, which is equal to $240 billion per year between now and 2050. This investment would help avoid the tragic and almost unimaginable calamities, as well as the full collapse of social order, that will surely accompany the continued disregard for the consequences of global warming. According to the same paper, if humanity continues with "business as usual," the financial cost will amount to $38 trillion annually from 2050 onward, totalling $1900 trillion by the end of the century. By then, the loss will equate to 60% of the international total GDP, effectively making everyone in the world 60% poorer. We should not forget that these future poor individuals are literally the direct children and grandchildren of our generation.
It does not require much imagination to envision the implications for the poor masses, who will face hunger in an age of nuclear weapons capable of destroying the planet multiple times over. We cannot keep overlooking the scientific knowledge that even a few nuclear exchanges anywhere on the globe could generate a catastrophic nuclear winter, which may lead to a mass extinction of living organisms similar to what happened when a large meteorite hit the Earth 60 million years ago and led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. Also, we should remember that when human masses become hungry, the ugly manifestations of their hunger could be limitless. You do not need to have very pessimistic creative talents to imagine what starving masses with access to nuclear weapons can do. It is not an exaggeration to state that when humans go hungry, they cease to rely on their neocortex—the part of the brain responsible for rational thinking and reason—and instead revert to the primitive "lizard brain" in the midbrain and hindbrain, which knows very well how to trigger rage and other destructive instincts.
Returning to the costs of avoiding the calamities of climate collapse, according to the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University in the United States, the cost of U.S. wars post-9/11 reached $1 trillion, with 940,000 direct victims and 3.8 million indirect victims spread across 78 countries worldwide.
The United Nations published a report in February 2024 estimating that the cost of reconstruction in Ukraine will exceed $486 billion. The Council on Foreign Relations in the U.S. reported in May 2024 that U.S. expenditures on the war in Ukraine had reached $175 billion. These figures should be added to the European Parliament's January 2024 report, which stated that EU support for the war in Ukraine had cost EU taxpayers over $95 billion. The United Kingdom has provided approximately $16 billion since the start of the war in Ukraine. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, global military budgets reached $2.44 trillion in 2023 alone.
The examples are innumerable worldwide, demonstrating that funds are readily available for the strong and powerful when they wish to wage destructive and unfruitful wars that lead only to the suffering of the weak and the poor. This occurs while diplomacy—the art of finding compromises—is often neglected in favour of the constant threat of force as the primary and sole solution to disagreements among the world's powerful elites. These same elites attribute the failure to address the imminent crisis of climate collapse to a lack of financial resources, particularly in the richest parts of the world, as if the global populace is amnesic and blind to the multi-trillion-dollar "money trees" that were harvested to bail out big banks during the Great Recession of 2008 and to fund the quantitative easing policies that followed. These policies effectively created over $21 trillion out of thin air in the wealthy and powerful countries, including the United States, the European Union, Japan, and the United Kingdom.
The ultimate aim of globalized and unregulated capitalism in the neoliberal era has always been to achieve the highest possible profits in the shortest timeframe, regardless of the collateral damage—referred to as "externalities" in economic jargon—in the form of environmental devastation or human suffering. This pursuit of profit continues even if it means turning the world into a wild jungle where no one cares for anything but their selfish gains and immediate gratification, with utter disregard for future generations.
However, the calamity of climate collapse is no longer a distant threat. It will strike forcefully and universally in a few years, not decades or centuries. It will spare no one. Everyone will pay a hefty price when life becomes a perpetual cycle of fleeing one ecological catastrophe only to fall into the trap of another.
It is time for everyone to wake up and act now if we are to avoid the tragic end of organized human societies on planet Earth, which will be transformed into a ubiquitous collapse of social order worldwide. It is no longer feasible to bury our heads in the sand. We must organize and act with every possible means before it is too late, as the vicious cycle of climate catastrophe we currently face threatens to become unstoppable.
References*:
*This is a list of references provided by the speaker to the meeting organiser after the talk for distribution to the audience and for future publication of the talk transcript:
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