A new study of the health related benefits and cost savings of mitigating global warming indicates that it would produce overall costs savings as health care costs would decrease. In addition, premature deaths have their own costs to a society in lost worker productivity, wages, and the taxation that follows those wages, compounded by the costs of social programs to support widows/widowers and orphans and provide other assistance to families.
The study is reported on at Physics.org:
phys.org/…
Projected costs to hold global warming to two degrees centigrade would cost somewhere between $22.1 trillion and $41.6 dollars. But air pollution related deaths, a major cause of death worldwide, would reduces the deaths from air pollution related disease by 21-27%, generating significant savings. Holding warming to 1.5 degrees centigrade would be much more costly, but save even more lives and costs. The scientists only figured in air pollution related deaths and savings which they believe underestimates the total costs that would be saved. Imagine if we stopped having such strange and large swings in weather patterns with related crop failures, storm damage and additional deaths that occur from droughts and storms. Imagine no mass migrations by people who can no longer survive in their traditional homelands.
On the down side, if saving lives can have a downside, many of the reduced deaths would occur in India and China, two of the most populist countries which are striving towards increasing living standards and industrialization. The lives saved represent burdens on a planet already teeming with too many humans. In my opinion, we can’t achieve long term goals of saving lives and stabilizing climate until we start reducing population totals. The answers to doing that lie in some rather basic premises. We educate girls, we increase opportunities for women everywhere to participate fully in society. With educated women, with women in positions of power, all sorts of social issues in a society, from limiting family size to greater support for family friendly social programs, tend to improve. We are more likely to have a society that is civilized, as the Danish women pointed out to Oprah Winfrey. Greater diversity, greater liberty, more education, more caring, about people and the whole planet are the cure for what ails us. What we don’t need is a mad rush forward driven by conservatives, male dominated societies who worship acquisition of more than anyone else, until we have a planet ravaged by climate change, starvation, lack of water and war on a level that is hard to imagine.