Hacker News Reader

Comment by makerofspoons | Hacker News Reader

The economy is going to kill every generation from here on out. It is estimated that climate change will knock off 10% of the US GDP by the end of the century: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/23/climate/us-climate-report...

How do we go about changing societal expectations to stop expecting perpetual growth? People aren't going to be happy it is no longer a given their children will do better than themselves, or even that they will be capable of taking care of them in their old age due to resource and economic crunches.

View on HN

I'm all for taking action against climate change, but the 10% number is just pure fear mongering. Robert Rhode at Berkely did an excellent job of showing what the true risks are here:

https://twitter.com/RARohde/status/1067375440661307393

As politicized as this climate change has become, I would hope to see more reasoned responses in the future - but given the current environment of discussion, I won't hold my breath.

Pure fear mongering is "there's a migrant caravan of MS-13 rapist drug dealers and ISIS coming from South America with polio and smallpox".

The 10% number according to the twitter feed you linked is characterized as "unlikely and many things would have to go wrong to get there"

I'm sorry, but in a world that elected Donald Trump, "unlikely and many things would have to go wrong" is a cold comfort.

Without perpetual growth wouldn't those who are not already well off have almost no hope of getting ahead? That is, it seems like currently the system only works for at least the middle class because people can invest in 401ks and mutual funds. If those were taken away then what would the non 1% have left?

Edit: To be clear, I mean this as an honest question. I see a lot of smart people arguing that expectations of growth need to change in order to tackle issues like global warming, but I don't see a scenario where that doesn't result in most people becoming serfs.

We don't. If those who want to fight climate change don't understand that economic growth is not an option but a requirement, then it doesn't get fought.

That said 10% in a century isn't that hard -- think of the different standard of life between 1914 and 1996. Even 10% poorer in 1996 would still be effing amazing, and we would likely have more than that without two world wars and a Spanish flue (also why I shifted it 104 years back).

How do we go about changing societal expectations to stop expecting perpetual growth?

If we move civilization to a solar system wide context, we could easily support a human population of a trillion.

> It is estimated that climate change will knock off 10% of the US GDP by the end of the century

10% is just 3-5 years of growth.

GDP would still be 10 times higher than today, assuming 3% growth.

Paywalled for me, but I presume that's "knock 10% off of what the US GDP otherwise would have been by the end of the century" and not "the US GDP at the end of the century will be 10% lower than it is now". That is, we'll have less growth than we would have had with a better climate, but we will still have growth.

In fact, what would US GDP growth be over 80 years? The real US GDP grew 900% from 1947 to 2017, which is 70 years. If we could do anything close to that over the next 80 years, but then we lose 10%, that's still pretty good.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com