Gross Domestic Product is an extremely useful analytical tool. But like any tool, it needs to be used in appropriate situations. Assessing negative impacts that will be felt worldwide, but especially concentrated among the world’s poorest people, is not such a context. Nate Silver has an excellent map illustrating the point—what would the world look like with 5 percent of GDP wiped out? Well, it could look like a world in which the U.S., Europe, and the developed part of East Asia are slightly poorer. Or it could look like this world in which 81 countries containing 43 percent of the world’s population are wiped out:
Conventional wisdom has it that for the purposes of US domestic politics it doesn’t make sense to talk about the impact of climate change on the developing world. I’m not so sure. It’s very difficult to imagine Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) wading through the jungles of Vietnam slaughtering villagers and redistributing their possessions to the people of Missouri. It’s easy, by contrast, to imagine her tweeting complaints about Waxman-Markey being unfair to coal-dependent states like Missouri. To an extent, in other words, I think it’s worth raising the ethical stakes around this issue.
Nobody’s quite sure what the solution is for people and countries trapped in severe poverty. But we can be fairly certain that “cause them to drown so we can drive bigger cars” is not the answer.
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