My friend Jonathan Koomey‘s invited perspective article, “Moving beyond benefit-cost analysis of climate change”, was just posted by the open access on-line journal Environmental Research Letters. Here’s the abstract and the introduction.
Abstract
The conventional benefit–cost approach to understanding the climate problem has serious limitations. Fortunately, an alternative way of thinking about the problem has arisen in recent decades, based on analyzing the cost effectiveness of achieving a normatively defined warming target. This approach yields important insights, showing that delaying action is costly, required emissions reductions are rapid, and most proved reserves of fossil fuels will need to stay in the ground if we’re to stabilize the climate. I call this method ‘working forward toward a goal’, and it is one that will see wide application in the years ahead.
Michael Totten‘s comment:
Outstanding article, Jonathan Koomey. I particularly liked this passage, “Delaying action eats up the emissions budget, locks in emissions-intensive infrastructure, and makes the required reductions much more costly and difficult later. The IEA, using the ‘working forward toward a goal’ approach, estimated the costs of delay at about $0.5 trillion US for every year we put off serious climate action [13].
Conversely, early action through technology deployment brings the costs of technologies down through learning-by-doing, which is one manifestation of increasing returns to scale [19]. Because of these and other factors, our choices now affect our options later, which is known in the technical literature as path dependence [19, 20]. Luderer et al highlight the importance of such effects to the economic outcome on climate mitigation, but most conventional models of the economy ignore them [19, 21], with the likely effect of overestimating the costs of reducing emissions.”
My comment:
It’s so clear. Who wants to waste half trillion a year?
Which means the only obstacles are (1) those that profit from the delay, and (2) those that are disinformed by those that profit from the delay.