Member-only story
How Much Does It Cost To Reverse Climate Change?
And do we even have enough money to save our Earth?
In January, after U.S. President Donald Trump announced his intention to withdraw the country from the Paris Climate Agreement and signed an order to rescind the US International Climate Finance Plan, news came out that Bloomberg Philanthropies will be working with partners to cover the U.S. contribution to the U.N. climate body’s budget.
This got me thinking. Do the wealthy have enough to stop climate change through their initiatives? And if not, do we, as a whole, even have enough resources to recover all the environmental damage we have inflicted thus far? After all, annual global carbon emissions have more than quintupled since the 1950s (growing from 6 billion tons of CO2 in 1950 to over 35 billion tons each year), we lost 1.5 billion hectares of forest (an area 1.5 times the size of the United States) over the past 300 years, and temperatures have risen so much that the 10 warmest years in the historical record have all occurred in the past decade.
That’s a lot of damage we need to undo.
How Much Will It All Cost?
Of course, no one knows the true dollar cost of ending climate change and reversing all the damage that we have done. Every reforestation…
