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Basically, the energy budget of the average citizen of the developed world is much higher than we can support at the moment. Much of the massive amount of material consumption that the US' current way of life is based on is an artifact of artificially cheap energy (especially single family home suburban). To avoid relatively catastrophic scenarios, we need to not only cut our new emissions to near zero very quickly, but we actually need to go strongly negative. It will take a mix of many different sequestration efforts to reach the required amounts. And all of this will be expensive, and added onto the effort to deal with large numbers of displaced people as developed areas become untenable to maintain, and crop failures get worse. A big fission build-out would help a lot, I'm a huge proponent of it, but it's not a silver bullet, and empirically, we have a very hard time with it, at least in the US. I think a phased-in revenue-neutral carbon tax with dividend and border adjustment is the closest thing we have to a silver bullet option. But we'd have to get used to less material consumption as we work to shift things over, because things would be a lot more expensive for a while. The bright side, for most, is that a large portion would be borne by the rich. Things would be more expensive for everyone, though, and populations usually don't react very well to large sudden drops in living standards, though, especially if they identify a particular group as being to blame for it. |