A common claim by many deniers is that global warming is good for us, or at least not as expensive as doing something about it. A couple of news stories from this past week puts the lie to those claims. And, this is just two.
The Asian Development Bank (ADB) stated it will be doubling the amount of loans for climate change adaptation from $3 billion to $6 billion annually by 2020. This is just for the Pacific and Asian territories, not world-wide. That comes to about $100 billion in additional dollars by 2050 in this one bank in this one market.
Additionally, the head of the Bank of England stated climate change threatens a global financial crises and long-term declines in wealth. Just the cost to insurers from weather-related losses has increased five-fold since the 1980s to $50 billion per year. Assuming those losses don't increase any further (a completely invalid assumption), the additional costs will amount to $1.4 trillion by 2050. By the way, the insurance companies will merely pass those expenses on to their customers.
These two events by themselves amount to $1.5 trillion in the next 35 years. When you include everything else and then factor in how things are getting worse, it is easy to see the claims of the deniers are lies. Just imagine what we could do if we devoted $1.5 trillion to fixing this problem instead of paying the coal companies to poison our land, water, and air.
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