The election of Donald Trump has hit the world environmental movement very hard and left many supporters of his vision frustrated and unsure what to do next.
Well consider this: How much could it cost to simply reverse the damage done in the last 50 years by global warming? Answer: $88 trillion.
That’s $88,000,000,000,000.
As a graphic put out by the Nature Conservancy of Australia put it:
On the downside, while a serious and effective plan to stabilize global temperature could be achieved for a little under $200 billion per year, that’s just two percent of the annual budget of the most well-funded global warming nonprofit.
On the upside, it would mean that the “Ice Age” that brought 10,000 years of global warming would be stopped, giving a chance to the remaining 6,000 years of a habitable climate for billions of people.
In other words, environmental defenders should consider these options – and throw money at the counter.
Professor Edward Maibach, director of the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University, said that this matter is a “huge, looming financial crisis in the midst of an environmental crisis.”
And to make the dire financial facts less of a reason to give up, consider this: Even if it costs at least half a trillion dollars a year, it’s easily doable thanks to money from the world’s wealth.
Should you throw money at reversing global warming?
If so, the environmentalist organizations around the world could explain to you that money is fungible. That means that having the money to fight global warming today creates wealth that can be used to fight other global warming issues for years or even decades to come.
That way, no matter what Trump has done, the world environment will be easier to care about and protect from in the future.
Therefore, environmental activists should — put it another way — “run the other way.”