Economics, like climate science, is full of numbers, graphs, extrapolations. But there the similarity ends.. I don’t have time, right now, to go into detail about this. The key things to understand are that the future is “discounted” because the assumptions are that extra costs now will be higher than the lower costs later, when we have shiny new technologies that will sort out the problems more cheaply (see the film ‘Don’t Look Up’ for more about this.
The other thing to say is that economists like to exclude things that they can’t easily count or would spoil the beauty of their graphs as (negative) externalities. There’s the joke about the physicist, chemist and economist wash up on a desert island
“If we just enlarge the pie, everyone will get more”. This has been the imagery of Capitalist growthmanship since the end of World War II- and I once did my share in propagating it. But the growth of the pie did not change the way the slices were distributed except to enlarge the absolute gap between the lion’s share and the ant’s. And whether the pie grows, or stops growing, or shrinks, there are always people who suffer from the behaviour of the cooks, the effluents from the oven, the junkiness of the pie, and the fact that they needed something more nutritious than pie anyway.”
Bertram Gross, Friendly Fascism
“anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”
Kenneth Boulding (paraphrased – see Quote Investigator).
And check out Professor Steve Keen on “The appallingly bad neoclassical economics of climate change” in the journal Globalizations. Here’s the abstract –
Forecasts by economists of the economic damage from climate change have been notably sanguine, compared to warnings by scientists about damage to the biosphere. This is because economists made their own predictions of damages, using three spurious methods: assuming that about 90% of GDP will be unaffected by climate change, because it happens indoors; using the relationship between temperature and GDP today as a proxy for the impact of global warming over time; and using surveys that diluted extreme warnings from scientists with optimistic expectations from economists. Nordhaus has misrepresented the scientific literature to justify the using a smooth function to describe the damage to GDP from climate change. Correcting for these errors makes it feasible that the economic damages from climate change are at least an order of magnitude worse than forecast by economists, and may be so great as to threaten the survival of human civilization.