As others have commented, $14.5 trillion USD (even with inflation) is nothing compared to the US's current outgoings.
What I _never_ see costed is the other side - what negative cost will the climate policies have on GDP? I imagine that number to be far greater.
For example: Great, you increased fuel tax and got less people driving. Now people can't get to work, deliveries are now too costly, the cost of living increases because even basic items like food need to be transported to the store, with costs given directly to the consumer.
The single most concerning thing is that no politician appears to be doing these calculations. There is no open discussion about viable climate policies that don't crush the middle and working class into poverty.
You're not supposed to say it out loud when you're concern trolling. We've had the other side non stop from every politician and all media for decades. Even the 'left' politicians only do the bare minimum most watered down measures after decades of public pressure and ironclad science and not even that if there's a remote chance it could hurt their donors.
Solar is cheaper than any other option after ten or twenty years of serious investment. Initiating the cost drop has been an option for at least fifty and possibly 100 (as the first commercial PV panels were a technology with good cost efficiency and 5% energy efficiency and were produced decades before the photoelectric effect was discovered -- the creator thought they were thermoelectric initially) years simply by not actively propping up fossil fuel interests at immense cost and instead putting a fraction of that money into renewables.
Cars are the single biggest dead weight loss in any economy by orders of magnitude. Families are spending upwards of 30% of their income and a quarter to half of their productive hours on being able to participate in cities or towns that were intentionally demolished and rebuilt to make them unlivable without one at immense cost. Building walkable towns, trains, and density in place of cars reduces commute times, reduces deaths by hundreds of thousands per year and avoids millions of injuries and illnesses in a country the size of the US.
Without enforcing car ownership, land can be used much more effectively and housing can be far cheaper without dedicating more of a town's land to the car than the residents.
Then there are the trillions spent on destabilizing and invading countries with fossil fuel reserves to ensure they will sell it for a pittance only in USD and not give their workers livable conditions.
Insulation (and sharing 1-3 walls with your neighbors) is an unmitigated benefit to everyone, and all it would have needed is minor policy change.
An enlightening book I read on this topic is "False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet" by Bjorn Lomborg.
The book explores the cost of: doing nothing to fight climate change vs doing everything to fight climate change vs doing something in the middle that optimizes global GDP (the book uses GDP as a "human welfare" metric).
My biggest take away from the book is that regardless of global temperature increases through the end of the century, global GDP is still projected to grow A TON. But because of the temperature increase, global GCP will grow _slightly_ less (like a few % less) that it otherwise would have. The wrong policies could cost GDP growth more than the temperature increase will.
Annual GDP of a country != the current sum total net worth of its population. Deleting the poorest half of the US population would destroy the annual GDP, which is built on the labor of said population. Theoretically, as the GDP of a nation grows, so does the quality of life of its population through better access to everything money can buy. It kinda doesn't matter how many billionaires there are if the rest of the population is still able to buy air conditioners, health care, sturdier houses, pay taxes, and generally afford the things that make the climate the least of their worries, as there are super diminishing returns on quality of life past a certain income level (all other arguments against billionaires are outside the scope of this comment).
Developed countries are quite well equipped (as in they're rich enough) to be able to adapt to the changing climate as needed. They can buy air conditioners, build dikes, choose not to build houses in areas prone to climate disaster, etc., all if which is insanely cheaper than attempting to reduce global temperature (though that's not an argument against any attempt to reduce global temperature). Making under-developed countries richer allows them to stop doing the "worser" things that aggravate climate change and make their populations unhealthy (like burning wood for a lot of their energy needs).
(This comment is just an elaboration on the arguments in the book I mentioned—not me being an expert.)
As @pseudobry mentions: 'the book uses GDP as a "human welfare" metric'.
I don't think anybody here (even the author of the book presumably) is suggesting that they are cause and effect, but they do appear to be correlated.
Also just because 50% have 1% of the wealth, doesn't mean they don't contribute towards the wealth of the other 50% of people holding 99% of the wealth. For example, your boss gets the majority of the profit, but they couldn't run the company by themselves.
So honest question of Rich people are 90% of the economy and climate change won’t impact them much then is a huge climate change cost really a possibility?
He's a political scientist, not a climate scientist but he seems to be working backwards from the agenda of "climate change is a liberal hoax" vs "we have a serious problem and need serious solutions to it".
I'd read it if I felt like there's valid knowledge to glean (i.e., ok, so what are the best thing to do) but not to put money in a denier's pocket.
I mostly found the book enlightening because it was a calm, rational voice amidst the constant stream of the-world-is-ending-by-fire/water/drought/heat/cold news that my tech bubble sends my way.
I didn't find anything in the book about liberal hoaxes. Rather I found the author to be diligently addressing a topic they find to be quite serious. Their argument is not against climate change (they very much acknowledge we have to address it), but against what they view to be ineffective (i.e. very costly, not gonna do much to affect temperature rise) policies.
A good portion of the book is dedicated to the author's ideas for more effective ways to deal with climate change in the long run, like pumping a lot more money into R&D, looking into nuclear more, helping developing nations shed climate-aggravating technologies faster, drafting local "adapt to the climate" policies, etc. The author is in favor of a carbon tax. Another idea explored is how making the right growth-promoting improvements in developing countries during the next 20 years could enable them to deal with climate change better over the subsequent 50 years (vs short-term growth-slowing policies that might look great during elections, but don't do much to move the needle by 2100).
I read the article you linked and found it hard to interpret it as anything other than a hit piece with an almost hysterical focus on painting the book and its author in the most negative light possible. It was quite a contrast from the book where the author makes their criticisms in the vein of "I think we can do better".
I agree that civil dialog is always preferable, but there's plenty of it out there that is polite in tone however anything but such in content. Tucker Carlson and Jordan Peterson come to mind.
I'll read the link I shared (again) to compare and contrast, as well as look for other reviews.
I'm in the camp that is terrified of what Climate Change has in store for us, and I want to understand it to understand what is truly scary versus what is being ginned up. While the media loves to get us excited I have to say that this time they're justified from what I know so far.
Question for the crowd: I read HN often but rarely comment, so I'm curious what I did wrong in my comment to merit the downvotes.
I was initially excited to see someone asking a question about a topic that I had _just_ read a book on (I also discussed the book for a few hours in a book group). It seemed like sharing that was a goodwill thing to do.
What I _never_ see costed is the other side - what negative cost will the climate policies have on GDP? I imagine that number to be far greater.
For example: Great, you increased fuel tax and got less people driving. Now people can't get to work, deliveries are now too costly, the cost of living increases because even basic items like food need to be transported to the store, with costs given directly to the consumer.
The single most concerning thing is that no politician appears to be doing these calculations. There is no open discussion about viable climate policies that don't crush the middle and working class into poverty.