re: #3 palomino

“Within a decade, solar will have become decisively cheaper than coal. This means that the worst-case climate projections are off the table, for the simple reason that even with no treaties and no individual state actions to limit CO2 emissions, the emissions curve will bend down sharply and fairly soon.”

Good post.

Wish I could be more optimistic about the bolded parts. The transition from coal to renewable will take more than a few years, so I’m not sure we can toss out the most dire climate predictions just yet.

Yes. You have to distinguish between costs of installing different kinds of new power plants (one set of cost comparisons) versus the cost of actually closing and cleaning up old plants plus building new, cleaner ones (a different set of numbers). Economic inertia may keep quite a few coal plants burning coal for a long time. That’s all the more reason to enact a carbon tax to push these facilities out the door faster by making their continued operation more expensive, that is, by making them pay for what they are already doing to the commons.