From a USA perspective there may be some devil in the detail. The costs are global, but the report says “Mitigation efforts and associated costs vary between countries in mitigation scenarios. The distribution of
costs across countries can differ from the distribution of the actions themselves (high confidence). In globally
cost-effective scenarios, the majority of mitigation efforts takes place in countries with the highest future emissions in baseline scenarios.”
Exactly where that leaves the USA I am not sure. USA has very large emissions, but the developing world will have higher projected emissions. Do you have any info on how the USA in particular?
The developing world gets more “bang for their buck” in burning coal and gas right now. That’s because they need the bootstrap to get themselves up and make the most of technological development, and infrastructure building.
Take a look at China’s economic rise, most of it was fuelled by coal burning, and to some extent nuclear. That was just to get them out of peasant farming and into the modern age, so now they can afford to spend money on education, Internet (filtered of course), higher level technology such as integrated circuit design and software, scientific research, etc.
Having done all that (presuming they keep their banking system stable, and continue to successfully repress various racial and religious minorities) then they can spend effort on luxury items like filtering those smoke stacks with the same fine grain attention that they filter their Internet. That’s the phase after you pull yourself out of poverty.
From a USA perspective there may be some devil in the detail. The costs are global, but the report says “Mitigation efforts and associated costs vary between countries in mitigation scenarios. The distribution of
costs across countries can differ from the distribution of the actions themselves (high confidence). In globally
cost-effective scenarios, the majority of mitigation efforts takes place in countries with the highest future emissions in baseline scenarios.”
Exactly where that leaves the USA I am not sure. USA has very large emissions, but the developing world will have higher projected emissions. Do you have any info on how the USA in particular?
The developing world gets more “bang for their buck” in burning coal and gas right now. That’s because they need the bootstrap to get themselves up and make the most of technological development, and infrastructure building.
Take a look at China’s economic rise, most of it was fuelled by coal burning, and to some extent nuclear. That was just to get them out of peasant farming and into the modern age, so now they can afford to spend money on education, Internet (filtered of course), higher level technology such as integrated circuit design and software, scientific research, etc.
Having done all that (presuming they keep their banking system stable, and continue to successfully repress various racial and religious minorities) then they can spend effort on luxury items like filtering those smoke stacks with the same fine grain attention that they filter their Internet. That’s the phase after you pull yourself out of poverty.