• Question: how much would it cost for the planet to go all eco

    Asked by hayeg003 to Claire, Joanna, Kapila, Renata, Suzanne on 20 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Renata Medeiros

      Renata Medeiros answered on 20 Jun 2013:


      Good question! It’s hard to put a number on it but most likely it would cost a lot less than it costs to be non-eco! The major cost is mostly in loosing some of our habits and the lifestyle we are used to.

    • Photo: Claire El Mouden

      Claire El Mouden answered on 20 Jun 2013:


      Well this problem only affects really rich countries. The majority of the world already live in quite eco ways (i.e. they reuse everything, do not use much electricity, don’t use much plastics or oils), simply because they are poor. So the challenge is for rich countries to find ways to make their energy and natural resource use sustainable, given that we also want to let poorer people live better lives too (which means letting them use more of the planet’s limited resources).

      I don’t know the exact figure, but what I do know is the cost if we don’t do it. Climate change will be far more costly!

    • Photo: Joanna Bryson

      Joanna Bryson answered on 20 Jun 2013:


      I have to disagree with Claire I’m afraid. Even in poor places, in fact even before there was industry, people damaged the environment by farming too much, cutting down trees faster than they could regrow, or hunting animals to extinction. It’s more than “going eco” and buying one brand rather than another. We have to be really, really smart about how build and use things. And unless we figure out how to move to new planets, we also need to figure out how to have fair numbers of children. Right now almost half the people that have ever been alive are alive! (42%) That many people just takes up a lot of space and eat a lot of plants no matter how eco they are. So we need to figure out smart ways to put things back in to the ecosystem to replace what we take out. It’s going to be very hard! But given we don’t know how to do it yet, we can’t say how much it costs — it’s quite likely it would actually save money if we really did it right.

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