> Instead, we should earmark all the money that would've gone into reducing carbon emissions (a carbon tax could be useful for this) into developing comprehensive evacuation plans for every major city, as well as a fund for rebuilding.
What does earmarking money into a rebuilding fund mean? Hoarding U.S. dollars in some account? There is no way to save in current U.S. dollars, ie green pieces of paper, in order to help deal with civilization level catastrophes in the future. You would have to save in terms of real goods. Saving in terms of dollars simply would result in deflation in the near term as you hoard, and inflation in the long-term when you dishoard in order to deal with the catastrophe. When the catastrophe comes, there is no difference between the government dishoarding dollars and the government printing dollars. The government has a printing press, there is no difference between taking the money (metaphorically) out of a hidden vault and between printing new dollars.
Now saving now in terms of hoarding real goods, or in building physical infrastructure, could work. But it's hard to imagine what kind of real goods would be useful in case of massive catastrophe. Most likely the wrong things would be built or hoarded. We're just too far away from the problem, and the government isn't good at making those kinds of calculations. Also, it may not be that necessary. People underestimate how much more valuable flows are than stocks. When cities have been destroyed by fire or bombing, they get rebuilt remarkably quickly, as long as the human capital is still there.
I normally don't vote in threads I comment in, but in your case I just had to upvote. Too many people don't understand that you cannot really "save" money.
But let's deliver the GP's idea a final blow: The thing you could potentially save would be cheap energy, for example in the form of carbon-based fuels. Which is incidentally what proponents of carbon-neutral energy sources are advocating, by wanting to leave them in the ground.
I'd upvoted devinhelton's post as well, because it had been at zero when I saw it and makes an important point.
But I do understand the idea, and I'll go one further. The purpose of "money" is a form of claim check on the labor of other people, one that can be spent according to the preferences of each individual. When I say "save up to fund the inevitable devastation", I mean "it is probably more efficient to redirect the labor of people into fixing the problem after it happens than it is to invest it in changing production processes to speculatively prevent it from happening." I propose one possibility for this in a sibling thread: a carbon tax used to fund an insurance subsidy and additional federal disaster planning and possible infrastructure improvements. The financial & insurance industry can handle the administration; this is after all what the financial industry is for, arranging for a store of these "claim checks" so that you still have a claim on them in the future and yet they can be used for productive work in the meantime.
The government's only role here is to rectify an externality. Carbon emissions are causing harm to people not party to their production, so redistribute this back into the economy at the point that's being harmed, and let the market do the rest.
What does earmarking money into a rebuilding fund mean? Hoarding U.S. dollars in some account? There is no way to save in current U.S. dollars, ie green pieces of paper, in order to help deal with civilization level catastrophes in the future. You would have to save in terms of real goods. Saving in terms of dollars simply would result in deflation in the near term as you hoard, and inflation in the long-term when you dishoard in order to deal with the catastrophe. When the catastrophe comes, there is no difference between the government dishoarding dollars and the government printing dollars. The government has a printing press, there is no difference between taking the money (metaphorically) out of a hidden vault and between printing new dollars.
Now saving now in terms of hoarding real goods, or in building physical infrastructure, could work. But it's hard to imagine what kind of real goods would be useful in case of massive catastrophe. Most likely the wrong things would be built or hoarded. We're just too far away from the problem, and the government isn't good at making those kinds of calculations. Also, it may not be that necessary. People underestimate how much more valuable flows are than stocks. When cities have been destroyed by fire or bombing, they get rebuilt remarkably quickly, as long as the human capital is still there.