A new paper sounds the alarm over a crash in virtual climate wealth. It isn't science, it is just a computer simulation and therefore more like dystopian 1960s fiction than science.
Turning the climate hysteria amplifier knob to 11 has been a problem for emissions acceptance ever since the Global Warming Isn't Real community got the We Are Doomed community to embrace climate change and the belief that methane is as severe as CO2. Those were both created by deniers in the late 1990s, to undermine global warming models like that weird hockey stick. Deniers pretending to be critical thinkers pointed out that if greenhouse gases are a concern, methane is far worse, 23X worse, and that if the climate is impacted, weather shifts could mean more severe snowstorms and hurricanes, not just warming.
Rather than undermine anything, progressives who finally found science they could accept embraced it - and ironically proved deniers right that the doomsday narrative was more important than reason. Now, we get bizarre repeated claims that methane is a bigger problem than CO2 even though methane dissipates so fast it's an atmospheric IQ test to worry about it while CO2 persists - and every deviation in temperature from the average is called a result of climate change, which has caused most of Gen Z to dismiss the whole field as nonsense.
Anyway, you can relax, this claim is just economics. They can barely predict the past, they sure aren't predicting the future, and it was created using an equally suspect climate change estimate. Not as ridiculous as Al Gore's supernatural 20-foot ocean level rise but still not close to being science. It is the economic version of weekly Scary Chemicals Epidemiology that places like Harvard School of Public Health manufacture to mix it up for SEO experts at corporate newspapers when Miracle Vegetable Epidemiology is getting tired.
That is why editors in corporate media publish it. They get to monetize eyeballs by printing a whopping $25 trillion drop in GDP in 25 years. That is even more money than whoever was running the White House when Biden was President gave out to 16,000,000 government union employees. The authors say climate change is why insurance companies are fleeing California, even though everyone in science knows that California refuses to clear out dead trees - that is Evil Logging- or create firebreaks. Insurance, like electricity, is controlled by the state, so insurance companies are not allowed to increase rates on homeowners who move to high-risk areas and then vote down any fire mitigation if it costs them a dollar more.
In his first term, President Obama also threw out a lot of government money but he invented something clever - "jobs saved or gained." To claim success in paying an average of $25,000 subsidy for each new car that got sold under his Cash For Clunkers program, he got his economics team to create an entire supply chain benefit, including virtual jobs they estimated might have disappeared without him.
It was breathtaking economic mysticism and, like abuse of executive orders, has been used by every president since. If only we could spend virtual money. Except we can't. Government still causes inflation doing that, as we saw beginning again in 2021.
If there is an emissions problem, it isn't due to America. It isn't really even due to Europe, though importing wood pellets to burn so they could tell Europeans they burn less coal is bizarre.
We have drastically cut pollution in the developed world, in the US our emissions per capita are lower than 100 years ago, while Western leaders capitulated to China and let them have unlimited pollution and dismiss any concern about it.
Tightening the screws on poor people in America isn't going to help anything, being able to afford air conditioning is not the problem. Only bad economic epidemiology shows we even have a problem yet. That's no reason to pollute more, but it is reason to beware making the perfect the enemy of the good.
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