The climate crisis will destroy our economies – we learned this 20 years ago. When will we act? | Fiona Harvey

The radical Stern report showed that a low-carbon future is also good economics. But it seems that capitalism needs a reminder

Saving the only planet we have makes good economic sense. There is, after all, no money to be made on a dead Earth. There may be costs involved now, but they are worth paying to protect our children from certain destruction.

These propositions seem self-evident now. But two decades ago, mainstream economists had very different ideas. They had proved that the climate crisis would be a mere economic blip, easily absorbed by growing economies and therefore not worth spending money on.