Noah Smith at Noahpinion:
There are two ways to decarbonize: 1) degrowth, and 2) green energy. None of the proponents of degrowth are asking China to stop growing its economy1, and it wouldn’t matter if they did; China has no intention of slowing its growth in order to save the rest of the planet from climate change.
In fact, the same is true of the developing world. India, Southeast Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America aren’t going to impoverish themselves in order to save the climate. The only way for these countries to grow their economies without roasting the planet is to replace coal and oil with solar and batteries — or to grow rich using solar and batteries in the first place, skipping the fossil fuel stage entirely.
The only way this is ever going to happen is if solar power and batteries (and other green technologies) are really, really cheap. China, India, and the rest will not adopt these technologies because Greta Thunberg tells them to. They will only switch to green energy if it’s cheaper to do so.
So if we want to save the world from climate change, the only really effective way to do this is to make green energy as cheap as possible.
More here.
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