the greatest depression has yet to become*
Above: A venture capitalist in the year 2025 attends a lunch meeting.
Forbes, via AP:
Raising the stakes in the global warming dispute with the United States and China, Britain issued a sweeping report Monday warning that the Earth faces a calamity on the scale of the world wars and the Great Depression unless urgent action is taken.
[snip]
The 700-page report argues that environmentalism and economic growth can go hand in hand in the battle against global warming. But it also says that if no action is taken, rising sea levels, heavier floods and more intense droughts could displace 200 million people by the middle of the century.
The report said unabated climate change would eventually cost the equivalent of between 5 percent and 20 percent of global gross domestic product each year. The report by Sir Nicholas Stern, a senior government economist, represents a huge contrast to the U.S. government's wait-and-see policies.
This is, as a man much much wiser than myself once said, a highly business intensive society: we keep our minds on our money and our money on our minds, maybe more than any country in the world.
That said, is it possible that the looming threat of climate change causing an economic crash - not a downturn, but an out and out crash - will be the tipping point for a greener, cleaner planet, the nudge that succeeds where moral and intellectual arguments failed?
Possible. The nudge, but not the whole nut to be sure. Along with our crash education on the global ecosystem, we'll be learning a whole lot more about our own political and social systems in the coming years.
* It's from The Hobbit - "The Ballad of the Hobbit". I don't expect anyone ever to have gotten it, but it pleases me to use it, for reasons far too esoteric and Dex-o-centric to go into here.
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