One of his Manzi’s central points is that climate change just ain’t all that damaging, economically speaking: it will reduce global GDP by “only” 5 percent one hundred years hence, he writes […] The problem with GDP is this: it varies greatly across counties, by a factor of 800 or so on a per-capita basis between Burundi and Luxembourg… A lot of countries contribute almost nothing to global GDP, even though they may have tens or hundreds of millions of people. You could literally wipe them from the globe and the impact on global GDP would be de minimis.
Why don’t we try and do that, in fact? Let’s see how much of the world we can destroy before getting to 5% of global GDP.