News Reporter: Wonkbook: These experts say we have until 2020 to get climate change under control. And they’re the optimists.

Thursday 29 June 2017

Wonkbook: These experts say we have until 2020 to get climate change under control. And they’re the optimists.

The latest economic and domestic policy from Wonkblog

(REUTERS/Carlos Barria)

By Chris Mooney

A group of prominent scientists, policymakers, and corporate leaders released a statement Wednesday warning that if the world doesn't set greenhouse gas emissions on a downward path by 2020, it could become impossible to contain climate change within safe limits.

The group, led by Christiana Figueres, who oversaw the United Nations negotiations that produced the Paris climate agreement, base their case on simple math. The world, they calculate, probably has a maximum of 600 billion remaining tons of carbon dioxide that can be emitted if we want a good chance of holding the rise in planetary temperatures within the Paris limit of 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius (2.7 to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).

With 41 billion tons emitted every year from energy consumption and other sources, such as deforestation, there are only about 15 years before that budget is exhausted.

Emissions can't suddenly go to zero after 15 years — the world economy would grind to a halt if they did. Therefore, they must be put on a downward path almost immediately.

"When it comes to climate, timing is everything," write Figueres and her co-authors.

Martin Shkreli's trial shows just how angry people are about drug prices

By Carolyn Y. Johnson

Martin Shkreli isn't actually on trial for buying an obscure antiparasitic drug used by AIDS patients and jacking up the price astronomically, but he might as well be.

Three days into Shkreli's trial for alleged securities fraud -- for an issue unrelated to his notorious pharmaceutical price-hike --potential jurors kept circling back to his infamous decision to buy a little-known, little-used drug that was invented before he was born and raise the price overnight, from $13.50 to $750 a pill.

"The only thing I would be impartial about is which prison he goes to," one juror said. That person was dismissed -- as more than 250 were, as my colleague, Renae Merle, reports.

It would be easy to see this courtroom anger as a simple reflection of public outrage about drug prices, something that President Trump tapped into when he said the pharmaceutical industry was "getting away with murder." It certainly seems unlikely, after all, that many of the jurors in that courtroom have been personally touched by Shkreli's price hike -- the drug, Daraprim, is used by only about 2,000 Americans each year.

That leaves two options: Shkreli's smirk has become the face of any high drug price -- or the moral outrage is related to what Shkreli actually did.

Joshua Sharfstein, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, favors the latter interpretation.

"It's like if somebody increased the price of water during a hurricane; it's that kind of price-gouging that people really hate," Sharfstein said. "It feels fundamentally unjust and unfair. Think if you needed something for your family and people raised the price because they could."