I assert a consensus-aligned view: The eventual economic costs of climate change for anyone currently 10, 20, 30, maybe even 40 years old or younger could be debilitating if we don't respond more drastically ASAP. Reducing the nuance afforded by a cost-benefit analysis, which, yes, can e.g. inform a course of action over some span of time, to a binary judgement is useful in my rhetoric here because it reflects my perceived magnitude of your misjudgements.

Since you have expressed an inclination to do almost nothing, coded as "let The Market sort it out", your position is indistinguishable from a climate change denialist or someone who thinks that climate change is generally good. Hopefully that will help you understand some of my confusions regarding my perception of your position. Action-wise, they are all currently the same position.

The idea that the market will naturally provide appropriate economic incentives when the most significant costs are incurred only far in the future flies in the face of the way economics is now conducted. Amazon et al. have come to define the most long-term-est business model, at least in America, which says that a project has about 10 years to corner an entire emerging market sector and become profitable via monopoly. Almost every large-scale and established corporation, which are admittedly driving most of the economic landscape, demands a much more immediate 10% annual or equivalent quarterly growth. Because they seem to routinely disregard expert and consensus opinion when convenient, the financial-class folks don't always offer a maximally-informed funding landscape. And VC is still the most long-term-minded funding model in the extra-governmental economic landscape? Troubling.

Switching from animal power to motorized power was costly. Automating manufacture was costly. Eradicating polio was costly. Installing air conditioning is costly. If you do cost analysis instead of cost-benefit analysis you won't get the whole story.

Missing: A list of climate change benefits that don't pale in comparison to the costs.

If fewer people die in the winter, shouldn't that mitigate some additional heat-related deaths in the summer?

Oddly reminiscent of your "since covid just spiked up the death rate, less people should die later" argument from two years ago-ish. As of March 2022, nope. joke about wasO's popularity in nursing homes

The distribution of people vs. latitude is difficult to summarize in sweeping statements, except that "white" and wealthy countries skew very much towards the mid-latitudes already (and Northern hemisphere, but that's a landmass and history thing, largely). At least in the short term, the average human's latitude set to move further close to the equator, because that's where the population growth is, specifically in central Africa. Lo and behold. Another reason to consider whether lingering Western dismissiveness regarding the seriousness of climate change is related to systemic racism. Your favorite two words.

Why shift? People live with temperature changes of a few degrees every year, indeed every day. People retiring from New York to Florida will endure more climate change than New York will get in a century.

The distinction between voluntary choices and involuntary impacts renders the point null. But on top of globally heating up overall and localized anomalous heat events (and drought, and flood) of increasing frequency, weather patterns unfamiliar to the people native to any particular location are disruptive if the people don't have the know-how and infrastructure capable of handling new types of "natural" disasters. Not just heat deaths. Unpredictability in weather is also costly for the energy sector, and as we have seen, can jeopardize the integrity of an electricity grid. Eventually, incorrect predictions of increasing frequency from atmospheric neural network models trained on historic data will help further reveal the destablizing and inherently unpredictable nature of climate change. If it hasn't measurably happened already. And if the fine folks in Manhattan suddenly take a strong hurricane to the nose for the first time ever, but Florida's underwater? Everybody loses.

"By mid-century, the world stands to lose around 10% of total economic value from climate change." That is a lot of value in absolute terms, but average annual growth of 3% would more than double total economic value in that time, so people will still be better off (1.03^29 × 0.9 = 2.12).

All 10% of the economic contraction occurs IN ONE YEAR, after 29 years of unhindered economic growth?? No: It shaves the compounding 1.03 down a bit. It's also fantastic news to hear that there are no overall economic contractions in the future and climate change ends in 2050, instead of continuing to worsen like the climatologists are warning, even if we achieved a carbon neutral US and Europe by then. The effects will get worse after 2050, either way.

My biggest fear is that climate feedback loops push us towards system collapse. Coal to gas is a relatively minor concession almost certainly intentionally designed to fend off meaningful progress. Should we still do it? Sure, in addition to many, many other steps.

And previously, you wanted proof of overpopulation, right? Global warming is it. I would say "Maybe you have a point, and we wouldn't have to consider the Earth overpopulated if we can make significant cultural changes", and then you're like "We should definitely not change our lifestyles very much at all, it would have immediate costs that I and the billionaire class have decided are too expensive for us, personally". Unless you're secretly a billionaire, that argument makes way more sense for you than them (they have a few spare dollars), but they're funding the brand of information you prefer to consume. Do you acknowledge that?

If you decide that climate change only will only cost the world one or two trillion dollars between now and 2050? And there's a very good chance that if you threw significantly less than a trillion dollars (this fucking graph AGAIN!?) at fusion you'd get a technology that has one of the best chances at saving our skins instead of basically mothballing it 50 years ago? "Economic incentives" have failed us already, and were assuredly responsible for lobbying government to de-fund fusion and maintain the status quo. Again, the inability of economics to address long-term problems rears its ugly head.

As you can see elsewhere in these comments, I think the case could be made that switching to increasingly battery-centric energy solutions will likely lead to an unsustainable ravaging of the planet. On top of curbing energy demands, we must de-carbonize if the planet is to remain habitable. The response of Earth to such a high CO2 concentration will continue until the CO2 is decreased. Fusion is the best path to do it. Throwing up our hands Jamie Dimon-style is not an option. It's not what a majority of us want, either.

The inability to appropriately respond to climate change is an indictment of economic fetishism and the economic incentives that got us this far into the hole in the first place. Btw, this is also related to your strange conviction that profitability automatically confers net benefit or value, in an economic environment where e.g. Andrew Tate can make a shitton of money championing domestic violence and Jordan Peterson rakes in the dough from worrying about all of the transsexual genitals he'll never see. Many more caveats abound, but I digress.

Meta: What does it say if you prefer a cost-benefit framing through the lens of a perspective overly hostile to expertise and institutional trust, and then decide that properly addressing climate change ultimately costs you too much money, in this moment? It says we can't abolish tax law, because you can't be trusted to properly vote with your money, which undermines your entire vision for society.