The Costs of Climate Change

It hardly surprises me that there are a lot of people, in the wake of the IPCC's most recent report on climate change, who are looking for any reason they can find to downplay the information and recommendations. The Wall Street Journal, for example, had an editorial on that topic; I would summarize their position as "we can't do enough to fix the problem, so why should we waste time and money trying?"

There's a quote that I like as far as a response to that goes. I can't claim credit for it myself, and it certainly wasn't originally intended as a contribution to the climate change debate (it's originally from a web comic), but it still fits this situation extremely well:

"Then get started now. 'There is too much to do' is a terrible excuse for doing nothing."

To be entirely fair, there are parts of the WSJ's editorial which lean more towards the idea that the limited effect we can have on climate change isn't worth the large amounts of money we'd need to spend on the effort. Given that, it argues, we should just focus on increasing our economic and technological strength to put ourselves in a better position to deal with the problem once it actually is at a point where we have no choice.

This is a much more defensible point, but in the end I think even it falls short, because it relies too much on the idea that the necessary changes we'll need to make to adjust for climate change will be simpler and easier at some point. I don't think that's a reasonable belief. Some of the research and development might be a bit easier, but rebuilding our entire power and transportation infrastructure is going to be expensive no matter when we choose to do it. And either way, it's going to take time; putting it off for too long seems like a bad idea for exactly the same reason that waiting until one is already at war to build up their military is a bad idea. Even if the changes we need are more expensive than the damage from doing nothing, I think getting ahead of the problem is probably worth that price.