Carbon Brief guest post: Why estimates of the ‘cost’ of climate action are overly pessimistic
The “cost” of cutting greenhouse gas emissions is often used to argue that tackling climate change is expensive, providing a skewed image to policymakers and stakeholders.
In this post by Alexandre Köberle, Toon Vandyck, Celine Guivarch and Joeri Rogelj, which appeared in Carbon Brief last March 21st, the authors describe how treating climate impacts separately to the question of how to reduce emissions has created room for policymakers to focus only on the apparent cost of mitigation, ignoring the benefits of climate action.
With the release of the report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on how to reduce emissions – known as mitigation – there is an opportunity to clarify these issues and ensure a more balanced conversation about the economics of tackling climate change.
