Vocal Voices

That is a MASSIVE amount of money and is the figure calculated to have been lost from the global economy since 1900. Talk about shock and awe: We're all doomed, we must do something!

But take out things that the Earth does and we have no control over; earthquakes and volcanoes, and it drops to about $58tn, or roughly $650bn a year. That is a big number, but a small percentage.

Give or take a few trillion dollars the global economy was £77tn in 2014 making the average "loss" about 0.8% pa. So the next time economists, bankers and politicians tell me that it is too expensive for us to clean up our act, or to invest in the technologies and lifestyle changes to help us heal the environment I am going to laugh in their faces.

The only expense is the political one. It's not and never has been too expensive to fix things. Just more expensive than people want to pay for. Especially the politicians. They don't want to make the case for it so they just say it's too expensive and we don't want to lose that much money.

Jobs a goodun.

What gets to me is that they always use the big money number and never the small percentage.

So we get the likes of "It will cost "xyz $bn" instead of "2%". People then think "Blurdy'ell, that's a price!" instead of "What's 2%?".

I haven't found the equivalent total "global economy" figure for the 1900 to now period, but I guess it would bring the % figure to an infinitesimally small number.

Not sure. I'm pretty certain you could fit the entire global economic GDP for the first half of the last century into one decade now. But the 70's onwards will probably make it infinitesimal anyway.