The Heart of the Matter

Snapped on the way to work. Went to a very good talk by Ottmar Edenhofer, co-chair of the working group III of the IPCC on Climate Change Mitigation. I thought it was very positive, the issues can be fixed and it makes sense to do so (apart from the moral imperatives). The take-home message was, some form of carbon tax is required (unilateral is also good), invest revenue into low-carbon infrastructure and the net benefit will be a larger GDP than the cost of devaluing the assets of the energy companies. I suspect the last bit is the sticking point. However, there seems to be some interest of the institutional investors in a carbon tax. Well, we shall see.