As I have commented before, the clear responsibility of someone in Roger’s position of no little influence, is constant, unremitting, passionate advocacy of avoidance of dangerous human interference in the climate, providing of course that he believes such interference is likely. If he doesn’t believe that, he should be honest and let us know that he is at odds with nearly every respectable climate scientist. If he believes it, and fails the advocacy test, he’s a delayer 1000 in my book.

100 million Twh in Greenland and 1000 million Twh in the Antarctica.

In any case the bushian BAU melts these icemasses into the high sea and you find yourselves drowned and so on. Take the ice and ship it for fresh water around the world. Energy and water and no climate catastrophe any more.

A similar analysis could be done with coal and natural gas. While capital costs (initial investments) are high with renewables and nuclear, fuel costs make up a much higher proportion of costs for fossil fuel power plants. Nuclear fuel is lower in cost and renewables are essentially free.

I would say throwing out “$45 trillion” without explaining what it means as is nicely done here is pretty misleading, as is failing to account for the tremendous economic benefit that will offset most of the initial investment, independent of the long-term economic benefit of global environmental protection. It’s also not a rosy scenario to assume strong technological advancement over decades, especially when signficant market incentives are introduced and R&D is ramped up significantly. Progress under these market environments may be underestimated.

A more serious concern is who is to bear these costs. Cann’t be those trying to live on $1–2 per day.

This is one of the problems we don’t seem to want to accept. Consumerism will always (for the foreseeable future) generate by products that are not good for the environment. Unless we step down a large notch in our standard of living, based on ‘a material world’ then were suckered. Things are coming to a head here because we are reaching the limit of available resources base on our current population, technology and intellect.

Also, I wonder if you’ve looked at Promoting Energy Efficiency Investments — Case Studies in the Residential Sector, 324 pages, which also looked interesting.

You continue to show that you do not understand the meaning of a BASELINE scenario. The numbers that are provided in the report (or by you) do not add up to reductions of 53 GtCO2. Consider:

*Solar makes almost no contribution to the BASELINE (p. 367) [Once again by including solar in the BASELINE you confuse the BASELINE and MITIGATION scenarios]

*Wind contributes 2% to the BASELINE (p. 343), and thus cannot by definition provide a large contribution to reductions implicit in the BASELINE

*Nuclear increases by very little (1 TW/yr) (p. 284), and similarly cannot produce a large contribution to EI declines

*Assumed decreases in fuel use are exactly the problem — they are just convenient assumptions, how will they occur separately from the ? (p. 428) How will vehicle miles traveled be limited to a tripling as the global economy increases by a factor of 4? Such assumptions are convenient, but they influence the conclusions in significant degree.

You have provided maybe 3-4 GtCO2 (1+ wedge) worth of reductions in your list above, even including the unsupported assumptions. Is that enough? No, it is not. You need about 10-12 more wedges.

When we are talking about the accuracy of a $45T price tag is it a waste of time to see if it is an accurate estimate?

It is amazing that you endorse the results of a report that (a) calls for a range of technological breakthroughs requiring massive new investments in RD&D, (b) requires 90% penetration of fuel cell vehicles (for its $200/ton marginal cost estimate), (c) has 15 GtC of built-in wedges (but not explanation for the majority of these).

Except for Jack Benny (Caveat: Comment requires cultural relevancy.)

jc