Comment by toomuchtodo
5 hours ago
Is ~400 million to ~4 billions excess deaths over the next ~50 years worth it? How many excess deaths is it worth? Everything is about trade offs. How much mortgaging of the future with are we comfortable with for today’s luxuries? Because this is a debt that will need to be paid back, potentially by someone not even yet born, through no fault of their own.
At least the future can default on sovereign debt, it cannot default on the energy and resources required to repair physical systems required for survival, that debt is the ultimate recourse debt. There is nowhere to run from it.
https://climatechangetracker.org/climate-change-progress/cur...
https://actuaries.org.uk/media/ni4erlna/planetary-solvency.p... (page 32 risk impact matrix)
(day job is risk assessment and management, and the lens through which I see and model this entire system)
I hear what you're saying, but it is also true that re-splitting the population would probably be more difficult politically than e.g. switching off all the fossil fuel generation plants east of the Mississippi or gently transitioning the US fleet to all-EV. As you said, everything is tradeoffs.
Which sucks, because I really would go for a US high-speed rail network.