Wealthier people are more able to cope with climate change and are overall less likely to die from all-natural causes than the very poor. Whatever the ill effects of climate change, the funds needed to keep people safe will be far more abundant in the future than they are now. //

Each of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, that guide our understanding of climate change, account for large leaps in worldwide wealth between 2000 and 2100. Even the poorest in the world—sometimes called “the Bottom Billion”—will be four to eighteen times as wealthy as they are today, according to the IPCC.

Wealthier people are more able to cope with climate change and are overall less likely to die from all-natural causes than the very poor. Whatever the ill effects of climate change, the funds needed to keep people safe will be far more abundant in the future than they are now. In the short term, the resources AOC claims must be used to fight distant climate change have more pressing alternative uses because people are poorer now than anyone will be then, even by IPCC’s somewhat dire predictions.

To demand sacrifice from the residents of developing countries—like paying higher prices for scarce food so some of it can be burned as biofuel—will do far more damage than a potential flood in 50 years, when the risk of starvation will be small. //

Even in the IPCC’s worst-case scenarios, those facing the harms of climate change in 100 years will be many, many times more prepared to deal with those harms than we are currently equipped to sacrifice in hopes of preventing them.