…We won’t know the actual costs of mitigation until action is taken and costs are observed. Arguments about assumptions are unresolvable.
I’ve not yet had time to study the new IEA report — but Roger Pielke has — in particular the IEA assumptions behind their baseline projections. An excerpt shows how sensitive the assumptions are:
If we take the report’s marginal cost estimate of $200 to $500 per ton for mitigating carbon dioxide, then a simple estimate of the full costs from a frozen technology baseline would be an additional $210 to $530 trillion above the $45 trillion cited in the report. Yes, you read that right.
What if the assumption of automatic decarbonization was off by only 10%? Then the additional cost would be an additional $21 to $53 billion, or about the same magnitude of the IEA’s total cost estimate of mitigation (i.e., of moving from the BASELINE to the BLUE trajectory) .
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