Cutting CO2 Emissions Soon
Here’s a report you can skip; it shows how cutting CO2 emissions by 2016 would be better than cutting them by 2030. I’m not sure I need to be told that; the issue, obviously, is how to make it happen in a divisive and greedy world.
I’d like to be younger, richer, and better looking, but in the absence of a fairy godmother, that’s not happening either.
What would be nice is if someone actually tried to nail down a rough estimate for the global net economic benefit, and the national net economic benefit, for different paced CO2 reduction strategies.
The fact that environmental lobbies continue to discuss the environment separately from a discussion of economics has rendered the discussion completely useless. If you don’t tell someone how much they stand to gain or lose from different strategies, they will always hedge their investments to minimal and/or token investments.
Curiously, people are willing to GIVE more than they are willing to invest in beneficial enterprise that has a low perceived ROI. So since the environmentalists refuse to engage in a cost/benefit dialogue – preferring to keep the conversation tied to just “doing good” – they make certain the average American is only willing to support the absolute minimum investment. We need more investment, so it’s time we start analyzing the dollars as well as the sense.
We all know that increasing the rate of adoption for wind and solar (and geothermal – eventually), and more importantly increasing the investment in improving insulation and building efficiencies and helping with growth strategies and efficiency planning in the industrializing third world; all will help reduce the long-term impacts of global warming. There’s no-one out there who doesn’t understand that.
We need to know how much a 50-year strategy will cost and how much we would benefit from it as opposed to a 100-year strategy, and how much that would cost, etc..
This is a very interesting and important point, because, as you often point out, it is economics that determines the outcome. Here’s my response: http://2greenenergy.com/will-environmentalists/33736/.