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On Balance | Climate change: it’s past time to count the environmental costs of economic growth
- A clear accounting of the real environmental impact of our economies should be included in every GDP report
- The call to action is ringing with renewed urgency as we grapple with the clear signs of a climate crisis
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Homepage editors at major news outlets had a difficult challenge last week. What should get top billing: US economic growth blowing past expectations or the fact that July was set to be the Earth’s hottest month on record?
The two items shifted position as the stories were updated last Thursday, when the sets of data were released, and remained well above the fold for much of the day, along with stories about searing heat in Phoenix and wildfires on Greek islands.
This juxtaposition is becoming increasingly difficult to stomach, particularly in the way that the surprising growth of the US economy is treated as something completely disparate from the others.
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It’s difficult to know exactly how much of our economic activity is responsible for the extreme weather driving people from their homes in Europe and Canada because of wildfires, or into their homes in many other parts of the northern hemisphere to escape the unprecedented heat.
We know that activities like smelting aluminium, raising livestock and transporting untold millions of needful things to our front doors send massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, trapping heat and, subsequently, causing increasingly disruptive climate events.
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But too many of us have a persistent and Pavlovian response to news of economic growth: “strong growth good; weak growth bad”. And the deeper analyses that follow the headline numbers tend to focus on the political implications for those in power and/or the likelihood of further interest rate rises.
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