Ocean damage nearly doubles the cost of climate change

Ignoring the blue economy has left a multi-trillion-dollar blind spot in climate finance.

See full article...

 

[LordEOD]

The peasants will incur those costs... not only monetary, but with (further) destabilized societies, unlivable habitats and vastly reduced future prospects.

and by peasants, I mean all of us that aren't 10% and up levels of wealthy; they are the ones extracting the wealth from anything and everything and leaving the rest of the 90% of the world to suffer the consequences and costs.

Fully expect the mechanism of socialize-the-costs, privatize-the-profits to continue full steam ahead with no regard for Earth's and our own ruination..

I still have hope that eventually smarter and more responsible heads prevail and that, collectively, humanity will wake up to the cliff that lays ahead and stop the train in time..
but I am also a realist and considering the way things have been going lately, both here in the US and abroad as well - it diminishes those hopes.

I will still do what I can to reduce my carbon footprint and try to live responsibly and sustainably and I will still do what I can to support those organizations, individuals, groups and politicians that also want to see a sustainable and eco-responsible way of societies.

 

[Maxx Floss]

trump doesn’t live in the ocean.

Americans voted against their interests and voted for trump.

Knowing the person who brought that bag of shit to the party doesn't make it stink less.

 

[Sadre]

I taught the concept of the tragedy of the commons every time I subbed for a Poli Sci professor. "We already covered it!" "You are going to cover it again."

I didn't cover it enough.

 

[Fatesrider]

The peasants will incur those costs... not only monetary, but with (further) destabilized societies, unlivable habitats and vastly reduced future prospects.

and by peasants, I mean all of us that aren't 10% and up levels of wealthy; they are the ones extracting the wealth from anything and everything and leaving the rest of the 90% of the world to suffer the consequences and costs.

Fully expect the mechanism of socialize-the-costs, privatize-the-profits to continue full steam ahead with no regard for Earth's and our own ruination..

I still have hope that eventually smarter and more responsible heads prevail and that, collectively, humanity will wake up to the cliff that lays ahead and stop the train in time..
but I am also a realist and considering the way things have been going lately, both here in the US and abroad as well - it diminishes those hopes.

I will still do what I can to reduce my carbon footprint and try to live responsibly and sustainably and I will still do what I can to support those organizations, individuals, groups and politicians that also want to see a sustainable and eco-responsible way of societies.

As noble as your intentions are, with the tipping points falling climate change is accelerating. We are speed-running the end. Mitigation has no chance of even delaying climate change long enough for us to adapt. It literally never stood a chance to work in the first place. We started on that AT LEAST two generations too late. And we still don't have it down.

So, the good news is that the well to do will be brought down in the end, very likely before the rest of us. Those who most rely on civilization for their power and influence will die when civilization does. THAT will come first. No one gives a shit how much money you have if you don't have food, clothing and shelter. Those who live simpler lives closer to the land will survive the longest.

I'd go on, but it only gets more depressing. Suffice it to say, the well-to-do will die first, not last. They'll have the places the rest of humanity will fight to live in. And when it comes to fighting for survival, humanity has no compassion for its fellow human, and even less for those who would stand in the way of their survival.

 

[jdawgnoonan]

I'd go on, but it only gets more depressing. Suffice it to say, the well-to-do will die first, not last. They'll have the places the rest of humanity will fight to live in. And when it comes to fighting for survival, humanity has no compassion for its fellow human, and even less for those who would stand in the way of their survival.

I am not sure that is depressing. It is just nature being nature. I wish nature was kinder, but it isn't and humans are no different. We have the most capability of destroying things. Even when we think that we are fixing things we often are just breaking them in a new way. Civilization created a guise of civility that is not actually real and never was except for to a few who enjoy its comforts. Kurt Vonnegut called it a "Manicured Wilderness" and that is what it is. So be it.

 

[Arstotzka]

I'd go on, but it only gets more depressing.

A universally applicable phrase in these times.

 

[Hypatia]

I taught the concept of the tragedy of the commons every time I subbed for a Poli Sci professor. "We already covered it!" "You are going to cover it again."

I didn't cover it enough.

I hope you spent some time on the work of Elinor Ostrom. Her analyses on the use of common spaces/resources run counter to Hardin’s direction and offer a wider conversation, in my experience.

Northeastern (.edu)

NAS Ostrom Bio

Science bio (journal)

Ostrom Workshop (with links to papers)

*edited to add final link

 

[numerobis]

Good thing the carbon tax in Canada was zeroed out by the economics expert we elected as PM, so we’re no longer taxing at half the social cost, but at 0%.

 

[ubercurmudgeon]

Given that the only thing left of the human race in a million years will be the Voyager probes, floating silently between star systems, we really should've stenciled our epitaph on the inside:

"Homo Sapiens: We didn't fully calculate the externalities."

 

[MarkR_]

The peasants will incur those costs... not only monetary, but with (further) destabilized societies, unlivable habitats and vastly reduced future prospects.

and by peasants, I mean all of us that aren't 10% and up levels of wealthy; they are the ones extracting the wealth from anything and everything and leaving the rest of the 90% of the world to suffer the consequences and costs.

For some anti-climate-action political groups (e.g. United Russia, the US Republican Party), suffering is extremely politically useful.

If poorer countries collapse and there is a wave of immigration, imagine how much US Republicans and their ideological allies in other countries will be rubbing their hands together. If they're not in power, they can prevent action (like Congressional Republicans did in 2024) to spike anxiety and win elections.

If they're in power, it's another source of media stories to cause fear at home, and perhaps they can even use to do previously "impossible" things, like maybe get full-on concentration camps fully up and running.

 

[Northbynorth]

I have shifted between deep pessimism and some slight optimism the last 4 decades. The pessimistic parts we all know too well. I will just mention some few glimmers of hope I have seen. It is too easy to forget and just remember how fast it turned downwards again.

The nuclear arms reduction treaty between Gorbachev and Reagan in 1986.

The fall of the iron curtain in Europe 1989, and the Soviet union after that. The handling of nuclear arms in the aftermath.

The ban on Ozon depletion gases just a few year after the discovery of the ozon hole.

The readiness which some politicians (at the start), took on the much bigger question about climate change. We got the IPCC and a lot of resources pretty fast.

The start of the public internet, in the mid 90s. All the promising applications it got.

The strengthening in gun laws in Australia in 96, with large buybacks. Backed by both political blocks.

The rise of Linux, in the late 90s. An amazing joint effort by thousands of developers over the whole world.

The effort to reduce the lowest tier of global poverty to a fraction of before. At the same time increase the low middle class in previous poor areas like Africa, China, India, Southeast Asia and South America.

Almost entirely reduce the global birthrate to sustainable levels.

China emerging as a massive producer and user of green tech.

The response to the global pandemic. At first, despite a severe reduction of personal freedom many people stuck together and helped each other.

I cling to the these fragments of hope when things point in darker directions.

 

[Chance the Gardiner]

With a Klingon/Ferengi hybrid in charge, the US is actively accelerating the world's demise, annihilating the rest of the civilized world's efforts to contain the damage.

"Let's look at the world as it is, not as we would like it to be"

 

[needSomeCoffee]

Have for many years been taking a walk that looks down some cliffs on a good section of Puget Sound. Used to be a huge brown "freeway" of kelp running a bit offshore along the shore. So thick one might be able to stand atop it. Now there are a few strands of kelp. Amazing die off. Researchers think higher temps are a big contributor. Major loss.

 

[paulfdietz]

One can look at the value placed by the US government on non-US lives by looking at how much the government is willing to spend on foreign aid programs that would save those lives. It isn't much, orders of magnitude below the value of a US life.

 

[JMTronicHobbyist]

When you think of carbon capture, think of this: fossil fuels represent energy from the Sun, collected by plants and deposited in the Earth. When those fuels are burned we get to use a small fraction of that energy and CO² and water come out (I'm being simple with this). It took much more energy to put that CO² into the fossil fuels than we were able to recover from burning them. I think you can see where this is going thermodynamically. The energy needed to capture CO² must be much greater than the energy recovered from releasing it - multiple times more energy than all the energy produced from the beginning of the industrial revolution until today.

Even if you have some chemical process that doesn't use human-controlled energy, the CO² was originally captured mostly by the phytoplankton covering the surface of 3/4 of the Earth running chemical reactions more efficient than what industrial processes can achieve - are we really going to have reactors of that scale? I don't think so.

The sheer scale of what has been done makes it completely irreversible within any amount of time relevant to humanity, and I mean it's just physically impossible.

 

[squiggit]

I taught the concept of the tragedy of the commons every time I subbed for a Poli Sci professor. "We already covered it!" "You are going to cover it again."

I didn't cover it enough.

The tragedy of the commons is just a weird classist thought experiment to shift blame onto the nebulous masses and away from those who cause the most damage.

It doesn't scale very well though, because the net impact of large organizations can so thoroughly dominate any action taken by others.

When specific organizations or highly influential people can on their own wipe out the positive impact of thousands or millions of people, it's not a tragedy of the 'commons'

 

[A harmless pie]

I wish we had an incentive structure from which stewardship emerged. Instead, just about everyone in a modern economy has been trained on an incentive structure from which consumption emerges.

I'm frustrated, looking back in time at the cartoons that lured me into the maw of advertising for plastic trash, and caused me to grow into a creature that seeks wants before needs. I've spotted it, and now it's a struggle every year to convince my partner and her affluent family to avoid buying seasonal gifts for me. I'm not even asking or suggesting they tone it down amongst themselves. They don't know how not to trade their efforts for a pile of stuff that will get used once and then get stored in a basement or attic until it's covered in or becomes dust.

For my own part, I've drawn down in just about every sector of my own life and found that I'm no less happy or satisfied enjoying what I already have, and that I may never live long enough to enjoy it all. I've got decades to go barring fate cutting my strand short.

It's hard not to be frustrated seeing those with the most wealth doing so much damage for more more more, but then I know that folks like me who've been indoctrinated by this structure of being would riot if the situation changed too quickly, and their access to the things they've been trained to want was interrupted for even a day. I still whine when a webpage takes longer than a few seconds to load. Enlightenment is a process I guess.

Anyway, I wish people understood that the health of the ocean is no less important to the continued existence of life on Earth than the health of the atmosphere above it.

 

[VaughnB]

No problem. Just add some tariffs to Climate Change and we're all good.

 

[Oldnoobguy]

With a Klingon/Ferengi hybrid in charge, the US is actively accelerating the world's demise, annihilating the rest of the civilized world's efforts to contain the damage.

"Let's look at the world as it is, not as we would like it to be"

Please don't insult Klingons and Ferengi. Klingons have honor. Ferengi have the Rules of Acquisition. Both of these provided some guidance to prevent complete destruction of the social order by something like Trump.

There's only one life process I can think of that Trump is like. Trump is a bipedal malignant tumor. A malignant tumor spreads without limits and commandeers ever increasing resources from its host with no regard to long term viability of anything including that which it depends on. It has absolutely no redeeming qualities, which is just like Trump.

 

[SlappyFrog]

Bastien-Olvera and Ricke are optimistic this data will be a wake-up call for international decision-making.

While I appreciate their optimism I question their grip on reality.

 

[Stickmansam]

Good thing the carbon tax in Canada was zeroed out by the economics expert we elected as PM, so we’re no longer taxing at half the social cost, but at 0%.

The carbon tax was DOA, even provincws like mine BC that had theirs killed it. There are also alternative schemes like Clean Fuel Standards and the Industrial Carbon Tax that can carry more of the heavy lifting. If we get a carbon border tariff, it would go a long way given how much import.

I am also not a fan of Chinese EVs given their impact on our auto sector, but we're getting a whole bunch now and they'll help juice the low end EV market.

In the end, politics is the art of the possible and the carbon tax became poison. Just because something is the most economically efficient does not mean it is the most politically feasible. The CPC has pivoted to attacking the industrial carbon tax but given industry is generally not opposed to it that much and the number of actors there are smaller, it has a higher chance of survival.

 

[Veritas super omens]

I am not sure that is depressing. It is just nature being nature. I wish nature was kinder, but it isn't and humans are no different. We have the most capability of destroying things. Even when we think that we are fixing things we often are just breaking them in a new way. Civilization created a guise of civility that is not actually real and never was except for to a few who enjoy its comforts. Kurt Vonnegut called it a "Manicured Wilderness" and that is what it is. So be it.

...and so it goes...

 

[atmartens]

The sheer scale of what has been done makes it completely irreversible within any amount of time relevant to humanity, and I mean it's just physically impossible.

Which is why we need to stop emitting, ASAP. Now!

 

[Snark218]

This is why, when climate deniers start bloviating about how much mitigation is going to cost and oops too late, I like to just go, yep. It’s monstrously expensive. Trillions. And the alternative? It will cost even more. Multiples.

And then they just kind of drift off instead of admitting they don’t actually care about that either.

 

[Veritas super omens]

When you think of carbon capture, think of this: fossil fuels represent energy from the Sun, collected by plants and deposited in the Earth. When those fuels are burned we get to use a small fraction of that energy and CO² and water come out (I'm being simple with this). It took much more energy to put that CO² into the fossil fuels than we were able to recover from burning them. I think you can see where this is going thermodynamically. The energy needed to capture CO² must be much greater than the energy recovered from releasing it - multiple times more energy than all the energy produced from the beginning of the industrial revolution until today.

Even if you have some chemical process that doesn't use human-controlled energy, the CO² was originally captured mostly by the phytoplankton covering the surface of 3/4 of the Earth running chemical reactions more efficient than what industrial processes can achieve - are we really going to have reactors of that scale? I don't think so.

The sheer scale of what has been done makes it completely irreversible within any amount of time relevant to humanity, and I mean it's just physically impossible.

Well...pedantically speaking it is not physically impossible...just so close to it as to be irrelevant. That is, there is no law of physics that precludes the possibility. Just "laws" of practicality and human nature. Meanwhile we will burn more carbon this year than last. In an alternate timeline just before the 70 and 80's results of Exxon's research was completed a bacterial infection killed the CEO that in our timeline decided to double down on emissions. In that timeline his replacement pivoted to massive research of renewable. Anybody know how to shift to alternate timelines?

 

[Bernardo Verda]

Good thing the carbon tax in Canada was zeroed out by the economics expert we elected as PM, so we’re no longer taxing at half the social cost, but at 0%.

That was a political response (arguably a politically necessary one) to the success of oil industry propaganda and even more due to partisan politicization of the issue. (Totally unnecessary and hypocritical -- pre Maple MAGA "conservatives" were quite willing to be rational and reasonable on such issues.)

A large part of the blame should also be laid at the feet of the corporate mass media, which weren't less interested in challenging counterfactual political narratives than in reporting (effectively legitimizing) political differences and public griping.

 

[numerobis]

I'm pinning a lot of my hope on Helion, Zap, and a few other fusion projects. We will only stop burning fossil fuels when there is a less expensive alternative. (E.g. the Stone Age didn't end because we ran out of stones.)

Cheaper than fossil fuels: wind, solar PV, and EVs.

More expensive than fossil fuels: nuclear reactions boiling water to push steam through a turbine.

 

[numerobis]

That was a political response (arguably a politically necessary one) to the success of oil industry propaganda and even more due to partisan politicization of the issue. (Totally unnecessary and hypocritical -- pre Maple MAGA "conservatives" were quite willing to be rational and reasonable on such issues.)

A large part of the blame should also be laid at the feet of the corporate mass media, which weren't less interested in challenging counterfactual political narratives than in reporting (effectively legitimizing) political differences and public griping.

It was more a response to figuring that if they could de-Trudeau the Liberal Party and turn it into the Mulroney-era PCs, they'd win. Which was true, they did, in that moment.

 

[Veritas super omens]

I'm pinning a lot of my hope on Helion, Zap, and a few other fusion projects. We will only stop burning fossil fuels when there is a less expensive alternative. (E.g. the Stone Age didn't end because we ran out of stones.)

I admire your (misplaced) optimism...
By the time a fusion project comes on line temperatures will have gone up to at least 1.5C above pre-industrial and more likely 2C. If they even get built and not canceled. Meanwhile if we had used that money to build as many solar and wind projects as possible we would have been generating for years already. But we won't do any of that in the US. The fascists have all but declared war on blue states.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/pe...minnesota-washington-post-reports-2026-01-18/

In clear contravention to the US constitution.

 

[Mal Adapted]

I hope you spent some time on the work of Elinor Ostrom. Her analyses on the use of common spaces/resources run counter to Hardin’s direction and offer a wider conversation, in my experience.

Northeastern (.edu)

NAS Ostrom Bio

Science bio (journal)

Ostrom Workshop (with links to papers)

*edited to add final link

Thanks for mentioning Ostrom's important work. I wouldn't say her analyses run counter to Hardin's direction, however. Hardin believed that mitigating common-pool resource tragedies required "mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon", i.e. collective action to limit costs socialized by the "free" market. He was criticized for implying the TotC was inevitable without coercive government intervention (he was widely criticized for racist and White nationalist views too; some ideological attacks on him were justified, IMHO). Some years after publishing his bombshell in Science, Hardin remarked that his biggest regret was not titling it "The Tragedy of the Unmanaged Commons", because he was calling for collective management of common-pool resources, which could be provided by government or by stake holders. Ironically, he thought the biggest TotC was human population growth, because he didn't believe women could voluntarily limit their family sizes before global carrying capacity was catastrophically exceeded. To be fair, lots of people were worried about a "population bomb" when his article was published in 1968, because global total fertility rate (TFR) was over 5.0. By the time of his death in 2003, however, TFR was half that, and has declined nearly to replacement level by now. It turns out that when given the freedom and incentive to do so, women around the world will gladly limit their fertility!

Nonetheless, and despite ideologically motivated objections, "The tragedy of the commons" immediately entered the specialized vocabulary of Economics, because it dramatically evokes a broad class of free-market failures resulting in social diseconomies. Not all of them can be blamed on "the nebulous masses". Culpability for the oncoming tragedy of the climate commons, for example, is on literally everyone connected to the global marketplace. Fossil fuel producers enjoy wealth beyond historical dreams of avarice by charging all the traffic will bear for their products while socializing all the production cost they can get away with; and we consumers gladly socialize the climate cost of our total lifetime fossil carbon consumption, direct or embodied in all the goods and services we consume at the prices we're willing to pay. Instead, involuntary third parties around the world pay for our emissions with their homes, livelihoods and lives, regardless of their own contributions to the problem. The global economy can reach net-zero emissions only if consumers agree collectively, nation by nation, democratically or otherwise, to take the profit out of selling fossil carbon, so the otherwise-"free" market can drive capital and consumers to carbon-neutral alternatives. There will be relative winners and losers, so strong mutual coercion may be required with less than complete mutual agreement.

Ostrom, OTOH, emphasized that collective intervention has mitigated many historical TotCs, and advocated for the term "drama of the commons", as some developing tragedies can still be collectively rewritten. She focused on "polycentric" governance of common-pool resources, wherein "coercion" implies some form of social pressure, whether formal or simply normative, up to exclusion from the resource and even violence if a user violates the collective management agreement. Ostrom demonstrated that voluntary collective stakeholder agreements, supported by traditional community norms, can be as important as state authority at multiple scales. She acknowledged, however, that anthropogenic climate change requires global scale cooperation, within and between nations. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2009, for her work on the Commons.

 

[etxdm]

In order to stave off the feeling of doom just a little, all of us who care should at least do what part we can. I'm old now, but I made a conscious decision to find work away from a big metro area for most of my working career so that I could do the self-reliant thing, and though I missed out on some of the big city excitement, I never regretted it. I'm not a prepper by any means, but I grow and preserve a lot of our food and we are almost independent of the electrical grid (solar panel / battery system). I used to joke about the actual preppers, but I'm not laughing so much any more. Most people can't do all of this, but many can do something to contribute, even if its only riding a bike to work some days.

 

[arsisloam]

With a Klingon/Ferengi hybrid in charge, the US is actively accelerating the world's demise, annihilating the rest of the civilized world's efforts to contain the damage.

"Let's look at the world as it is, not as we would like it to be"

Em, Klingons are generally honorable people, while Trump is not. Trump is also much dumber than the average Ferengi. Trump is more like... Cyrano Jones.

 

[chaos215bar2]

With a Klingon/Ferengi hybrid in charge…

More like a Farengi/Kardassian (sic) hybrid.

 

[Asecondname]

Please don't insult Klingons and Ferengi. Klingons have honor. Ferengi have the Rules of Acquisition. Both of these provided some guidance to prevent complete destruction of the social order by something like Trump.

There's only one life process I can think of that Trump is like. Trump is a bipedal malignant tumor. A malignant tumor spreads without limits and commandeers ever increasing resources from its host with no regard to long term viability of anything including that which it depends on. It has absolutely no redeeming qualities, which is just like Trump.

Ferengi are a criticism of 80s capitalism, and Trump is an exemplar of 80s capitalism / mentally still there.

 

[jdearr]

As long as the goal is managing efficiency in order to maximize extraction, value-adding, and consumption, the mathematical conclusion is suicide.

 

[C.M. Allen]

It's a good thing that the oceans aren't a core part of the economic and dietary needs of something like 2/3rds of the world's population. So, you know, when we ruin them, surely no one will notice, right?

As long as the goal is managing efficiency in order to maximize extraction, value-adding, and consumption, the mathematical conclusion is suicide.

Well, infinite growth is the behavior of most bacteria and viruses, and they're the most prolific organisms in the world, so all we need is another life-sustaining planet to spread humanity to while we finish ruining this one. I'm sure we've that all worked out.

 

[rbryanh]

There are any number of reputable studies that estimate how many people climate destruction will kill over time. Similarly, there's been much attention paid to the all but inconceivable economic damage it is doing. The former is of concern to the billions who will suffer and die; the latter the predator parasite class who is indifferent to the deaths of their inferiors.

Logically, the lead on this and all such articles should be the schedule on which billions will die, and a few thousand more will lose income, not necessarily in that order. After all, if those with the power to ameliorate this nightmare cared about the deaths of billions, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

 

[Nora Lenderbee]

Em, Klingons are generally honorable people, while Trump is not. Trump is also much dumber than the average Ferengi. Trump is more like... Cyrano Jones.

Or perhaps Harcourt Fenton Mudd?
A toss of the coin.