Nobel Prize-winning economist Esther Duflo brings her data-driven precision to the climate crisis — and the numbers are damning. While world leaders haggle over finances at endless summits, rising temperatures will kill millions in the poorest countries by the end of this century. She calculates the staggering cost of wealthy nations pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, proving that getting billionaires to pay their fair share in taxes is the best way to cover these damages.TED Talks Daily is nominated for the Signal Award for Best Conversation Starter Podcast. Vote here!Interested in learning more about upcoming TED events? Follow these links:TEDNext: ted.com/futureyouTEDAI San Francisco: ted.com/ai-sf Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Full Episode
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. By now it's clear we need bold strategies to pay for and stop the damages of climate change. In this talk, economist Esther Duflo asks a blunt question. Why don't we just tax the world's richest people in order to pay for climate damages?
She explains why a publicly funded redistribution system financed by taxes on billionaires and large multinational companies could really work and says this grand bargain is more within reach than we might expect.
So most of the time when we think about climate change, we conjure these images of wildfires and storms and floods But the reality is that temperature alone kills, and in particular right here in Africa.
We don't see it in the capital of France or the US because it's mostly happening in poor countries, which are already hot, and where citizens don't have the protection of air conditioning or office jobs. By the best estimates, by the end of this century, in 2100, an extra six million people will die just because of increased temperature.
And all of these deaths will take place in low- or middle-income countries. Every ton of carbon that we emit from the US, from India, from China, stays in the atmosphere for a very, very, very long time, contributes to the warming of the Earth, and therefore, kills people. Now let's try, for the sake of concreteness, to put a dollar value on this live screenshot.
Now, I can see what you're thinking, the economies come, you know, we cannot really price life. The reality is we are doing it all the time. As individuals, we are thinking about, you know, the probability of dying in a bicycle accident and the cost of a helmet, and we kind of weigh one against the other. And our governments also do it.
For example, when thinking about the cost of investment that can protect the lives of people on the highway, for example. Mexico, which has about the world's average income, uses a value of a statistical life of about $2 million. So using this number of $2 million for a value of a statistical life as a benchmark, we calculated the dollar value of the life lost because of emissions.
And the costs are staggering. Every year, the greenhouse gas emissions of the OECD inflict a cost of $1.7 trillion, with a T, on low- and middle-income countries. And the costs are the largest in the countries that are the poorest. Take Niger, a country where the GDP is just shy of $650 a year. the yearly damages from the OECD emission in Niger are $9,000.
Meanwhile, from COP to COP, rich countries are nick-and-diming the poor countries for the climate money, for mitigation, for adaptation. We're supposed to be on the roadmap from Baku to Belem, from 300 billion to 1.3 trillion, but it is likely to be a road to nowhere if we continue with buzzwords and with hairy schemes. The money is difficult to raise. It's even harder to spend.
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