Tackling Climate Change Will Cost Only $150bn a Year Says the EU
Published November 01, 2009 @ 06:01PM PT
The European Union put the cost of fighting climate change into cold-hard figures last week. They explained that fighting climate change will cost $150 billion a year by 2020. But who's going to pay for it? There's some discussions to be had over whether it's up to the developed world to pay the vast majority of the bill, with many of the Europe's richest countries agreeing that they had to bear the biggest burden. Poland didn't agree, explaining that it was ridiculous for them to give aid to Brazil, a richer country, to help them develop cleaner industries and reduce emissions.
As usual when it comes to tackling climate change, most wanted to avoid making specific commitments, not wanting to go as far as Sweden, Denmark, the UK and the European commission demanded in leading the world to fight climate change. There was some agreement though — $10 billion a year would be needed from January to fast-track funding for the developing world. The EU is promising to pay its fair-share of the eventual full $150bn — one-third seems to be the most likely agreed upon figure for the EU to contribute. If China and the US match that ($30-40 billion a year), we'll be well on our way to tackling climate change.
Don't all of these numbers pale into insignificance when held against Wall Street losses and the stimulus package? After the last few years of billions and trillions, $150 billion a year, spread across the whole world, to save the world, doesn't seem like too much. The best bit? We're not just piling the money up as a sacrifice to climate gods, oh no — this is a real investment in green industry, in our future, and in our planet.
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Mike Smith is associate editor at Change.org. Email: mike@change.org
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Hey Mike,
Thanks for this post - I really like the site and have been following it as I follow the negotiations. My concern with this post is that it accepts the EU's estimate of the cost of fighting climate change.
Recent analysis of the UN figures suggests the amount may be closer to $500-600 billion per year and that’s for adaptation alone. The costs of unavoidable losses and damage from climate change may be significantly higher. Further the costs of taking mitigation action – developing and deploying carbon neutral technologies – will be at least the same as that again for the energy sector alone according to the IEA. This means the EU’s figure is out by an order of magnitude.
And even with the EU's figure they actually propose to only meet a third of that - the other money to come from a 'carbon market' and from developing countries themselves! I'd be happy to send you through some more resources on this if you're going to write on it again.
Cheers
Alex
Posted by alex rafalowicz on 11/03/2009 @ 02:05AM PT
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