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It’s not a matter of “stupidity,” but the desire for a better life. A “do nothing” climate change scenario will be bad for Bangladesh, but not as bad as hampering economic growth. By 2060, it will cost Bangladesh a third of its GDP. But put differently, losing a single percentage point of annual GDP growth over that period will be just as bad as the impact from climate change.

New technology will be adopted, but not fast enough. Bangladesh is currently at 4% renewables. But half the country doesn’t even have electricity. It’s building 10 GW of coal capacity by 2030 which will double per capita CO2 output. Gas is still the major energy source with some nuclear being built. There is nowhere to build solar or windmills, though off shore wind is a possibility in the long term. It will be many decades before Bangladesh uses primarily electric vehicles and vast numbers of ICE vehicles will be purchased in the meantime. The number of registered motor vehicles has tripled in the last decade—those are nearly all gas vehicles, and half are used vehicles imported from elsewhere. 80% are motorcycles, with very inefficient gas engines. And there are no alternatives to CO2-production for many construction and industrial processes.

Bangladesh will certainly take some measures to be greener. It has no economic incentive to use more fossil fuels than it needs to: it imports gas and coal and has no domestic industry or jobs in that area to protect. But it also can’t afford to subsidize renewables. It will deploy technologies based on true cost, and right now the cost of renewables + storage isn’t there, neither is the domestic infrastructure to go fully electric.

>A “do nothing” climate change scenario will be bad for Bangladesh, but not as bad as hampering economic growth.

Citation very much needed. Everything I've read about global warming tells me the eventual GDP impact of 'business as usual' warming will dwarf everything else. It's not just the flooding. It's the rise in wet bulb temps, the droughts, the forest fires, etc. This does not magically end at 2100 just because our projections end there. This goes on for millenia.

I cannot fathom, how one could look at the facts and science and come to your conclusion.

Compounding effects.

$1,000,000 5% over 80 years = $49,561,441.07

$1,000,000 4% over 80 years = $23,049,799.07

I don't even think the most outlandish have climate change being greater than 50% of GDP.

>... tells me the eventual...

To you this is an eventuality, to them the problems are right now, it is right now that they need electricity for the X million people without access to it, it is right now that they have to use huge amounts of concrete to build infrastructure, it is right now that they have to expand their transport/truck fleets to transport food to themselves or the million/several hundred thousands of Roinhya which arrived to the country in the last 2 years

Walk 100 miles in the other person's shoes

A ton of research has been done on the economic impacts of climate change, accounting for those environmental effects. E.g. https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/201...

The mainstream “facts and science” does not support the conclusion that climate change will eventually “dwarf everything else” in the economy, not even for hard-hit countries like Bangladesh. The 1/3 number for Bangladesh by 2060 is one of the higher estimates I’ve seen, from Asian Development Bank. Others show less than 10%.

See also: https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/08/19/climate-ch... (“Climate change could cost the U.S. up to 10.5 percent of its GDP by 2100, study finds.”).

10% is a lot! It’s trillions of dollars, and it would be worthwhile to spend a significant amount of money to avoid it. But we need to pay attention to the science.

I'm not sure what the argument is here, because no matter how persuasively you write the message board post, the empirical evidence seems to support Rayiner's argument, which isn't that carbon is good, but that the developing world is carbonizing far more rapidly than the developed world is decarbonizing.

Negative externality.

If electric cars really are more practical, we'll see that reflected in their adoption.

Electric cars will certainly be adopted eventually, because electric cars have an order of magnitude fewer parts , but in the short term ICE cars have a far more mature production line (a century of mass production) whereas EVs have been in proper mass production for maybe a decade, and their manufacturing processes are rather immature and changing/improving quickly as a result, but we need to deal with climate change now not once EV chains stabilize.

Yes, but do the patent holders or companies making that better technology see their side of the task: they need to give the developing countries that technology. The problem is that would mean giving a country that can manufacture more cheaply than they can the only thing left as a differentiator.

It's not up for them to try and learn from us, it's up to us to teach them.

Patents are only for about 15 years. Most of the important ones have expired already, the rest will in the future. (unlikely copyright).

Developing countries get their cars from developed countries. In 30 they will not have a choice about buying gas cars. 30 years is not that long on a global scale.

But 30 years is a long time on the climate change scale. To meet IPCC 1.5C and 2C targets we need to dramatically reduce emissions by 2030. Instead, they will continue to grow rapidly due to development in places like Bangladesh.

> they will continue to grow rapidly due to development in places like Bangladesh.

Your average Australian consumes many times over the co2 budget than a Bangladeshi, Sudanese or Nigerian combined

To reduce these emissions of the developed world is a far more important objective than Bangladeshis building a couple coal plants so they can give electricity to more than just 40% of their population

That widely misses the mark. There are sixteen times as many Bangladeshis, Sudanese, and Nigerians as there are Australians. And while Australia’s CO2 emissions are declining even as its economy keeps growing, emissions in Bangladesh are growing exponentially. Australia is a mature economy, while Bangladesh’s is currently doubling every decade, and it has many doublings to go before it reaches middle income status. That will come with huge increases in CO2 emissions.

Europe and North America now account for well under 40% of CO2 emissions and their emissions are shrinking: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-re.... Emissions in the rest of the world, by contrast, are increasing exponentially. Within a decade or so, India alone will emit more CO2 than the EU.

The current CO2 budget for sticking to 1.5C is about 400 gigatons: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-why-the-ipcc-1-5c-repor.... North America and Europe could cut their emissions to zero tomorrow, and the rest of the world will easily blow through that within the next 20 years. China by itself will use up that whole budget by 2050 if not earlier.

Visiting Central America, I noticed all the "hand me downs" from North America. This will be the challenge- new electric cars which are 10% cheaper than new gas cars won't be deployed there, because old gas cars are 90% cheaper than new electric cars.

The good news is the problem will eventually take care of itself when North America doesn't want its old Nissan Leafs anymore. The bad news is the delay.

In 20 years old electric cars will be all they can get.

> Surely the people of Africa or Bangladesh are not so stupid as to not learn lessons from the US.

Well, everyone everywhere right now keeps doing the stupid thing, despite knowing better.