Originally posted by Cow Poke
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If we are considering installing new power plants or turning off old ones, we can select from a variety of options. Obviously we won't know the exact future retail price of electricity or the exact future price of raw materials so we won't be able to do perfectly exact return-on-investment calculations, but we can come pretty close. So we can work out pretty close to exactly how much it would cost to replace all current greenhouse gas emitting power plants in the country (or world) with non-greenhouse gas emitting ones - in that instance we can come up with $X spent now would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by Y per year. And that varies for different countries, e.g. my country has long been ~80% renewables, the US is installing lots of new solar plants and natural gas plants (natural gas is not totally greenhouse emission free, but is better than coal) and gradually decommissioning old coal plants (though Trump has reversed some Obama policy on this out of his general hatred for Obama and the environment). Overall, in the world, the choices on power generation and greenhouse gases amount pretty directly to a will (or lack of it) to spend $$$ to reduce the problem and a detailed cost-benefit analysis for each and every country could be drawn up. Basically, this sector of emissions (constituting about 25% of global greenhouse emissions) is 100% solvable right now with current technology and it is simply a matter of choosing to spend money.
Other sectors are so varied as to be impossible to do an overall analysis - e.g. "Industry" (constituting about 21% of global emissions). It would have to have a case-by-case factory-by-factory analysis of what was being emitted and why. That is why a carbon tax is generally viewed as the best solution for this sector of global emissions: Pass the externality (global environmental damage due to emissions) back to the emitters as an additional cost of them doing business, and then they themselves can decide whether it's better for them to emit and pay for it or do design their business to emit less. The free market can thus solve the problem, as each individual makes rational business choices for themselves.
Two further sectors of global emissions, transportation (14% of greenhouse emissions) and agriculture (24%), look like they might be easy wins in future given technological improvements that look to be coming down the pipeline. i.e. electric cars, and artificially produced milk and meat. While it can be a bad idea to rely on the hope of unproven future technology (e.g. "fusion power is just around the corner #1960") electric & hybrid cars are at the point where they're proven to work well and it's a matter of major manufacturers scaling up their production and governments supporting their production and supporting recharging networks throughout their countries. In the agriculture sector, a huge proportion of the emissions come from milk and red meat, so if people became vegetarian that would largely fix it, but since that seems unlikely to happen, the more likely fix is the eventual success of lab grown meat and vat-generated milk, though these products are in their infancy compared to electric cars.
So, in sum, the major things the government could do:
1. Move swiftly to replace current emitting power plants with ones that don't emit. This would cost a fixed sum of $$$.
2. Institute a carbon tax on industrial emissions to pass the costs back to emitters to allow them to correctly price their market decisions about whether to emit or not.
3. Have policies that foster the development and use of electric cars and the building or recharging networks, and discourage the use of petrol cars. And/or have better public transport systems so people aren't using their own cars as much.
4. Have policies that discourage consumption of high-emitting milk and red meat and favor low-emitting alternatives - vegetarian options, chicken etc.
5. Have policies that encourage research into artificial generation of milk in vats and meat in labs.
6. Support 3rd world countries in creating non-emitting power plants rather than emitting ones, with $$$.
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