Climate change fight needn’t cost the earth – economist

Curbing climate change would cost no more than 1 percent of global income per year, and the world can afford it, development economist Jeffrey Sachs said on Wednesday.

“If we look seriously at mitigation, it is not too expensive,” he told a conference in Geneva on the humanitarian impact of climate change.

“If we invested around $700 billion per year, we would be able to create a sustainable energy system.”
The United States spent just $3 billion on sustainable energy last year – equal to 36 hours of spending by the Pentagon on defence, according to Sachs, who is director of the Earth Institute at New York’s Columbia University.

“The costs of getting off the calamity path of climate change are small, but markets will not do this alone,” he said.

Sachs said there had not been enough research to develop and test low carbon technologies, partly because the private sector had not been willing to pay.

He argued it was imperative to find a way to reduce greenhouse emissions without stopping economic growth.

AlertNet