The question is, what would such a reduction buy? And the answer is a few milliseconds delay in the - apparently inevitable - anthropogenic- global-warming-driven catastrophe.
We don't know what form this catastrophe will take. I've sketched a few exotic possibilities here, but serious floods or drought seem more likely. Whatever it is going to be, it will have to be big enough to get peoples' attention, and sufficiently obviously caused by anthropogenic global warming to motivate the general public to get something done to slow down global warming - a sort of environmental Pearl Harbour.
We can only hope that it isn't so Pearl-Harbour-like that it won't impair our capacity to wean ourselves off burning fossil carbon as our primary energy source.
I don't beleive in central planning committees any more than you do, which is why I'm hammering on the idea of taxing fossil carbon to an extent that its price reflects its real environmental cost over the next century, which would provide profit and loss motivation for the free market system to build the sustainable power sources. The scheme should be fiscally neutral - or as neutral as a tax and subsidise scheme can be - with most of the extra revenue being invested in the sustainable power generation schemes.
If it happened over-night - which is impossible - you'd lose 8% of your GDP on higher energy costs. This is no worse than happened during the 1973 oil crisis, which didn't exactly crush prosperity. Since the process would have to be spread over a decade or more, what you would actually see would be reduced economic growth.
The capital would be being re-directed to ends that would be less productive - in the short term - than if Exxon-Mobil and its friends were allowed a few more years of maximim profits. In the long term the changeover would be productive rather than destructive because the current system of burning fossil carbon as if there was no tomorrow is unsustainable and actively destructive.
Whereas the tsunami of desructive effects that would ripple forward from not making the reallocation are a legion, and well within my ken. Since you don't understand that anthropogenic global warming is real and getting worse, they are beyond your ken, and you feel happy to prattle on about the - imagined - destructive economic effects of getting our house in order, while ignoring the interesting consequences of - say - destabilising the Greeland ice sheet.
Except that that "huge" difference isn't enough to do more than stave off the consequences of anthropogenic global warming for more than few years, even if a significant proportion of the population could be persuaded to share you eccentric life-style - which may work in southern California, but would be fatal in the colder periods of a Dutch winter.
It won't do the job. Nobody is going to disdain or discourage it, but it is energy diverted from the campaign for an effective solution.
James Arthur prefers his own brand of ignorant stupidity, complete with added extra complacent self-satisfaction.
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I'm a tax-paying citizen - some of those trillions would come out of my hide. The increased cost of energy would be a negative benefit in the short term, but - since sun and wind are free and likely to remain so, while buying oil on the open market makes Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia rich now, and as peak oil starts to bite more deeply, even richer in the future - it's not going to be a negative benefit for all that long, particularly when you figure in economies of scale.
The increase in atmospheric CO2 is conjectural. CO2 emissions are dominated by the regular economy. Large scale capital works may increase emissions to some enxtent, but it won't be dramatic, and as the new energy sources come on-line they will increasingly compensate for the extra emissions that were involved in constructing them. The usual payback time is a couple of years.
Better in the sense that it has the potential of reversing the process. Since my various thermostats are already adjusted, the potential advantage of brow-beating me into living on the edge of frost-bite aren't - in any event - all that dramatic.
But is is always windy somewhere, and with a big enough grid wind power comes close to being a base-load generator.
The idiot conservationists can always find some creature whose habitat is going to be wiped out. Since anthropogenic global warming is going to wipe out a lot more species that the occasional tidal barrage, they can be told to take a running jump.
James Arthur in his role as a witless greeny. endorsing a solution that isn't remotely adequate to tackle the job.
Absolutely. And the way to do that is to raise the price of energy - ideally by raising the price of fossil fuel to a point that reflects the future damage that is going to be caused by the CO2 released to the atmosphere when you burn it. Not only does this encourage energy conservation, but it also encourages the right kind of energy conservation.
-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen