UQx DENIAL101x 6.7.4.1 Full interview with Michael Ranney
Channel: UQx Denial101x Making Sense of Climate Science Denial
Date: 2015-06-09

Climate change is real, so why the controversy and debate? Learn to make sense of the science and to respond to climate change denial in Denial101x, a MOOC from UQx and edX.

Denial101x isn’t just a climate MOOC; it’s a MOOC about how people think about climate change.

Prof Ranney would like to comment that around the 58-minute mark he states that that the world is subsidizing fossil fuel at about 1 Trillion dollars a year. That was a good estimate in December 2014 at the time of the interview. However, in May 2015 the International Money Fund (IMF) came out with a 2015 estimate of 5.3 Trillion dollars per year: http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2015/wp15105.pdf (p. 6). In comparison to the countries of the world, that 5.3 Trillion dollars(6.5% of global GDP) would represent the 3rd largest GDP in 2013, behind only the USA and China. With this more-than-fivefold subsidy increase compared to prior estimates, other data indicate that the annual cost to fully convert Earth to solar panels would be only one tenth, rather than one half, of the annual cost of humans' current fossil fuels subsidy.

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