Background

The climate crisis is so difficult to grasp, yet alone solve, be cause it is everything and everywhere. Yet, it doesn't clearly present itself. We know that heatwaves, floods, droughts, and 928872398 terrible things are made worse by the climate crisis, but it's difficult to say that one event is caused by it.

It's also difficult to get everyone to agree on anything, yet alone everything. Last I checked, we haven't come to an agreement on which god(s) to pray to, or none at all.

The Two Percent More campaign, recently discussed on the wonderful Outrage and Optimism podcast, states the solution clearly:

If humanity invests just an extra 2% of Global GDP in developing eco-friendly technologies and infrastructure every year, this would be enough to prevent catastrophic climate change, while also creating lots of new jobs and economic opportunities.

This is wonderful news (which economists and climate scientists have known for quite some time) because it has a clear, achievable target.

Two percent (US$1.7t) can solve iconic sustainability issues. As the Two Percent More campaign states, we can achieve:

• A carbon neutral economy by 2050 with annual 2% funding.
• Protect the Amazon with a one time 1% cost.
• Help make developing countries more resilient to flooding, drought, etc. with 2% over 10 years.

The Cruel Irony

Instead of actively solving the problem, we are making it much worse – we spend just a bit over 2% of global GDP (US$1.8b) on subsidies that harm the environment. This is almost definitely an understatement, as some of the costs of harm that these subsidies cause to people are not included.

Take for example fossil fuel subsidies. While the report notes that US640b is spent on direct fossil fuel subsidies each year, the true cost of this industry is as high as US$5.9t (nearly 7% of global GDP) when accounting for their full environmental, health and (missing) tax costs, according to the IMF. That's US$11m per minute.

Instead of creating a cleaner, greener planet, we're subsidizing the destruction of our planet and the killing at least 8m people annually (The number of people who died in 2018 from air pollution from the burning of fossil fuels).

The Solution

The solution is clear – stop subsidizing the harmful things and use that money to subsidize helpful things. Let's keep it simple and demand that polititians stop these harmful subsidies and instead invest 2% in the planet.

I have used the term "we" because it is our (tax) money, and our planet.