Dr James Hansen on The Open Mind.
“Signatures won’t save the climate”, writes Danielle Ola at PVTech.
And, despite the good news below, Bloomberg New Energy Finance warns:
The 2⁰C scenario would require much more money. On top of the $7.8 trillion, the world would need to invest another $5.3 trillion in zero-carbon power by 2040 to prevent CO2 in the atmosphere rising above the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s ‘safe’ limit of 450 parts per million.
Update, 2016-06-30
“Investment in renewables required to achieve global climate goals is ‘entirely possible’”. That’s from IRENA (International Renewable Energy Agency).
Update, 2016-07-14
We are apparently heading to the +3C to +4C region, even if COP21 is fully implemented. (See NCAR’s full report.)
ecoquant
The trouble is that people “think fast” about these risks, to borrow the term from Daniel Kahneman, and they should be “thinking slow”. The connection with climate change has been addressed many times elsewhere before.
The work of Kahneman and late colleague Amos Tversky has been neatly summarized by Heukelom and their’s a piece about their Prospect Theory on Wikipedia. Kahneman shared the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on such behavioral economics.
If ask him about it, however, you won’t like the answer:
$7.8 plus $5.3 trillion = $13.1 trillion.
How many AFFE (Annual Fossil Fuel Expenditure) units is that? 2 years worth of worldwide fossil fuel expenditures?
When we put it into that perspective, we can see what a bargain RE could be.
Exactly correct.
Is it exact?
This is a critically important question, because it seems to me that the best way – by far – to solve AGW is to talk about how much money we will save by doing so (and paint deniers as fossil fuel profiteers).
And we can’t talk about those numbers because we really don’t know what they are. And we don’t know what they are for two reasons:
1) Most people don’t write about the topic
2) Nobody seems to care that how much it costs is dependent on whether we approach the project as a commons project, or just let laissez-faire capitalism worry it around the edges. (People think the latter approach is just Jim Dandy and “empowering” which drives me absolutely bananas.)