Climate change: Who will pay to save planet?

Ecological transition, economic challenges (1/5). While the Glasgow Conference on Climate Change – COP26 – approaches, the world is not on the way to limit warming to 1.5 ° C. At issue: the price of the climate transition, which requires enormous investments.

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Good news First: Limit climate warming to 1.5 ° C is possible. “The solutions are available, and many of them are not very expensive,” noted the International Energy Agency (IEA), Thursday, October 13. The bad news, known to all, is that the world is absolutely not on the way to get there.

To stay at + 1.5 ° C rising, humanity can ever emit in all and for any 325 gigatons of co 2 . At the current rate, this “carbon budget” will be exhausted in eight years. For 2 ° C warming, he will hold about twenty-five years. And that’s all. Beyond, each additional program means more virulent warming.

The great gap between the hoped scenario, for which countries around the world have committed during the Paris Agreement in 2015, and the reality is largely explained by a problem: the economy. To achieve carbon neutrality in 2050, as the European Union promises, in particular, the electrical system must be changed, turn off the coal plants, put an end to gasoline vehicles, better isolate the housing, replace the heaters by Heat pumps, invent new industrial processes for steel and cement … The construction site is gigantic and expensive.

While the COP26 starts the 1 November in Glasgow, Scotland, Le Monde tries to answer two basic questions: how to finance the ecological transition? And who pays?

“Verdir” Electrical production

Let’s start by meeting an “optimistic” – it’s he who says it. “I think there is $ 30% likely to limit warming to 1.5 ° C,” says Adair Turner, in a big smile. The British was, between 2008 and 2012, the President of the Committee on Climate Change, the state organization that advises the British government on its strategy in this area. He today has mounted a Circle of Reflection, the Energy Transitions Commission, who seeks to determine the most credible scenarios to achieve carbon neutrality around the world. His conclusion: “The climate transition by 2050 will have a zero impact on the standard of living or GDP [gross domestic product] per capita.” Clearly, economically, people would not suffer from this transition. “But that does not mean that the transition has no cost,” he corrects immediately.

Explanation. Its scenario – there are relatively similar tens – consists in following the following steps. It is first necessary to “verdir” electrical production, with wind and solar (and in its case, nuclear power); Then, it is necessary to “electrify” the economy: the cars become electric, the electric heating is generalized, the production of steel starts to operate with electric arc furnaces …

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/Media reports.