@B123

I appreciate you making that point, because I do agree the cost in lives matters. I would not have this war for that reason.

I was intending to speak narrowly of people's obsession with price, because I think many people complaining about the price WOULD accept casualties in exchange for their own comfort.

The climate issue itself ALSO has a cost in lives, of course. Sadly, many of those casualties would be seen as acceptable by far too many of us ... even if (though we never phrase it that way) our own children may bear that cost.

Denial abounds.

So I'm not even saying the Iranian people should pay that cost ahead of others on Climate, just that climate's a cost everyone will pay if we don't address this. It's easy to try and talk about this in terms of money, not lives, but money is just a proxy for priority. And many lives still hang in the balance in a variety of ways.

Sometimes I hear that we can't afford to do the things we need to do for climate because they're too expensive, which I hear as we needn't or mustn't prioritize this because money tells us that it's not a priority. And that's just not true. Once we get to talking like that, we need to talk about the fact that money is not even serving the societal purpose that it actually needs to.

As proof that I do in fact think of lives as well, I offer this cross-reference to my 2010 essay, The Cost. It illustrates another monetary issue, sadly also tied to the Middle East. But I mention it more because it offers another way to think about the relationship between money and lives in a slightly different way (complementary not competing) than you and I are doing here, by opportunity cost.

All of these different angles matter. And we need not to be nationalistic about these costs. Wars are rarely instigated by the ordinary people of any country. They are mostly indulgences of the Rich and powerful, adequately detached, able to think of lost lives as a budgetable expense because they and theirs are not part of that budget. The Draft was a scary concept, but it gave everyone a stake. Many were able to relax when we move to an "all volunteer" army. But they did not look closely at the dark reasons some are driven to volunteer. And war should not be something one can relax from.

The Cost (my 2010 essay on Iraq War cost)
https://netsettlement.blogspot.com/2010/08/the-cost.html

#climate #ClimateCost #cost #money #lives #TheDraft #war #gasoline #GasPrices #IranWar #IraqWar #OpportunityCost #HealthCare