How does climate change affect the economy?
1 Answer
Basically, three ways: costs to move away from fossil fuels, opportunity to make money from new cleaner technologies, and the costs in dealing with the damages brought on by a changing climate.
Explanation:
The world economy is heavily dependent on the use of fossil fuels right now, especially for power generation and transportation. Keeping the economy going hinges on energy.
So, if we are to move away from fossil fuels to cleaner energy sources, we have to make fossil fuels more expensive and renewables less so. This means a big hit to those sectors of the economy who have invested heavily in fossil fuels (e.g. oil companies, coal companies, pipelines, refineries, etc).
The other part of this equation is that there is tremendous "up side" economic opportunity to cleaner energy technologies, and associated companies, as we move away from fossil fuels.
The third economic impact relates to the fact that if we don't get going soon in keeping warming below 2 degrees C, we will end up paying more and more in dealing with the impacts of climate change (e.g. more storm damage, impacts from heat waves, sea level rise flooding people out, increased costs to fight forest fires and many more).
