Acting Now Is Fiscally Conservative

QUICK NEWS: Over on Climate Progress, Dr. Elizabeth Sawin and Dr. Lori Siegel had a nice post (or repost) recently on the cost of ambitious CO2 emissions cuts now versus the cost of pushing the ball down the road. Graph from that above. The summary:

“Postponing commitment to ambitious targets until after 2020 would commit countries to rates of CO2 emissions reductions in decades beyond 2020 that exceed those typically seen in the current generation of energy system models, making future efforts to limit temperature increase to 2°C more expensive and disruptive than needed. Without deeper reductions than are currently pledged by 2020, future generations will have sustain very rapid rates of reduction in emissions.”

I think this is common knowledge now, but perhaps it is not so common amongst our political leaders or they just don’t care since those higher costs will come in several years, once they are out of office. Check out the full piece for more.