How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

These notes are old and were written while reading — they don’t necessarily reflect my current views.

Ideas: Climates prisoner’s dillemma Prog Bar: 0.01% progress: 0.01

Bill has an enormous understanding for economics and a deep appreciation for markets, which makes this book so readable for me. His main massage is that at the heart of the issue is the uncertainty of the future. this drives up the interest rate, and therefore allocates money in the near instead of the distant future. The goal of all of us should be to solve this with financial engineering, consumer behaviour and certain commitments to future policy. The problem with current policy is it’s future uncertainty which makes it unattractive for financial markets to invest in technologies which might profit from them. The main policy point should therefore be a price on CO2, which reflects the true costs to get to net 0 (which means the cost to capture the rest of the CO2. This gives the ball to financial professionals which then can do what they are best at: Arbitrage that thing into oblivion and thereby allocating funds near perfectly.

Bill goes into much detail about what technologies are needed for that like carbon free concrete and steel. The more interesting point in my estimation is the key role that Bill gives to the power grid. His approach involves electrifying everything we can, so that the only thing we then need zo worry about is to clean up our electricity. This is an intriguing thought that appears to work which many technologies including e.g. transportation.

A central point of his book are green premiums which he analysis quite well. He gives the reader the different possibilities to solve the problem. being willing to pay them as a customer or driving them down through innovation. Green premiums should be the unit we use to tackle this problem. If it’s <0 we’re golden.