David Roberts appeared yesterday on The Alonya Show to discuss a U.N. report that says $1.9 trillion a year in incremental investment in clean energy will be necessary to avoid serious climate damage and comparing that total with the amount spent on war.

 

"The take-home lesson is that the cost of the clean energy revolution is not actually that big," says Roberts at Grist. "It just sounds big because it's new; we spend far more on war (and other stupid sh*t), but we're used to that. The novel is always more striking than the familiar."

You might remember a post from last week about the cost of war to the tune of $4 trillion in Iraq and Afghanistan- and what that money could've bought.

Here, again, is the list:

 

-Provide 280 million people with 100 percent renewable energy (based on this study of moving the entire planet to renewables).

-Pay for America's entire high-speed rail system eight times over — and that's according to a deliberately high, rail-hostile estimate from the CATO institute.

-Pay for a comprehensive preschool system for every child in America 40 times over. Preschool has been shown to be one of the single most effective interventions for disadvantaged children. (Universal preschool would cost $100 billion, according to NPR's Planet Money.)

-Wipe out our entire yearly trade imbalance with China 14 times over — if we gave the money to China, and we could force its citizens to use the money to buy our stuff, anyway.

-Pay off almost half the mortgages in the U.S. If we spent this money on ourselves instead of our overseas escapades, it would mean something like 18 million households could start living rent-free. (Total U.S. mortgage debt is around $10 trillion.)

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