Is $15 Billion Enough to Tackle Climate Change?
by Stacy Feldman - Nov 8th, 2007
in
That's the annual investment Hillary Clinton said she would make to solve the energy and climate crisis in her new energy plan.
Fifteen billion a year for ten years for a total investment of $150 billion. She calls it “fiscally responsible,” and it is. One hundred percent of her plan would be financed by a combination of removing tax breaks and closing loopholes for oil and gas companies, and from the proceeds that would flow from her cap-and-trade action.
Sure sounds like a bargain basement deal. Even more so when you compare it with what we're spending on the war effort. We’re about to invest another $200 billion in Iraq and Afghanistan, on top of the $400 billion already allocated.
To be fair, it’s tricky, and some say impossible, to put a precise price tag on curbing catastrophic climate change. Jeffrey Sachs in this commentary in Nature makes a reasonable ball park estimate that jibes with IPCC assessments. The global annual costs of emissions abatement, he says, would be around 1% of world GDP. World GDP is currently at around $50 trillion, so that brings the immediate climate investment required to around $500 billion. Under Clinton, it looks like the US would contribute about $15 billion come 2009 to the effort. Is that enough for a nation that is responsible for 25 percent of global emissions?
Feel free to pick apart the numbers. But it doesn't take the world's top economists or its Nobel Prize-winning team of scientists to surmise that Clinton's proposal probably is not going to cut it. Not from the nation's biggest economy, which has so much to gain from investing massively in a new energy economy and so much to lose if it stays on the sidelines. And not when we have just ten years.
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