Credit goes to the widespread efforts at various levels including through this blog to raise awareness of climate change.

It may be helpful is we stop measuring the state of our well being not by GDP but rather by some Wellness Index. I understand that there are efforts to promote doing so.

1) Work with the level of seriousness that already exists

If people are willing to go forward on improving car standards a bit and researching non-emitting energy to an extent, work on those things. Make sure that the resources are well deployed, and that people see the results of efforts.

Try to overcome institutional barriers to action, such as lack of coordination.

2) Convince people to get more serious

This is probably the most important thing the IPCC has done: convince people of the potential severity of climate change, and what is involved in addressing it.

3) Prepare so that when people do get more seriousness, you know what to do and are ready to act

Make sure that every incremental increase in political will goes towards letting a worthwhile new initiative go forward. It may be too much to hope for a carbon tax this year, but be ready if a government five years from now is willing to try it.

Similarly, on technology, projects, etc.

The HDI takes into consideration life expectancy at birth, the adult literacy rate, the combined primary, secondary, and tertiary gross enrollment ratio, and the natural logarithm of gross domestic product per capita (note that this takes into consideration some of the distributional criticisms you mentioned).

What I do not dispute is that a lot of this improvement has arisen as the result of unsustainable practices, especially reliance on fossil fuels. It will be a real challenge to switch over to renewable sources of energy without losing some of these gains (or even having the HDI reduced to a pre-1975 level).

I really don’t think this is true. If you look globally at factors like life expectancy, infant mortality, education, incidence of disease, etc, the figures for this year look a lot better than those from 1971. In particular, a huge number of people in Asia who have escaped extreme poverty.

On the broader point about how to assess welfare, while there might be some scope for motivating some people through changing methods, I really doubt that this is a mechanism through which societal seriousness of the kind required can be created.

People increased in increasing GDP rather than overall value might use this argument to argue in favour of global warming. Increasing GDP at the price of overall value has been the rule of thumb for market regulators since end of Bretton Woods. That’s why as per quality of life indicators, most people are worse off now than they were in 1971, despite GDP drastically increasing.

Numbers that don’t motivate people aren’t much use.

P2 Increasing disadvantage of the less well off can reduce to increasing productive efficiencies in the form of lower labour costs (understood in the wide sense to include the possibility of lower safety and health standards)

P3 Increasing productive efficiencies can lead to increases in GDP

C1 In certain cases increased GDP can be a result of reduced overall value (from P2 and P3)

C2 Measuring overall value by GDP will under-reflect the decrease in overall value caused by global warming. (From P1 and C1)

When it comes to the damage that could be done by climate change, it seems like conventional GDP figures can do a decent job of expressing it. If we continue to emit greenhouse gasses on a business-as-usual course, we will probably see 5.5°C to 7.1°C of temperature increase by 2100, with huge consequences for the economies of both rich states and poor ones.

While there is a strong case to be made that there are kinds of values not well captured by GDP, we can make the case for investing in mitigation, so as to end dependence on fossil fuels and avoid dangerous climate change, without having to develop a more holistic standard of value. This is well illustrated in the economic assessments that have been done, such as the Stern Review and Garnaut Review.