Phasing out coal would save the world $78 trillion
The heatwave that hit India and Pakistan earlier this year put “unprecedented pressure on power demand in India and Pakistan, where people... had to endure hours of cuts amid the crippling heat. On Friday [29 April], peak demand in India touched an all-time high of 207,111 MW,” according to official figures reported by The Guardian.
It is a tragic irony that India’s and Pakistan’s immediate response to this period of extreme heat has been to expand electricity production from coal-fired power plants, which can only worsen the intensity of future heat waves.
How can we stop this infernal cycle of increased energy demand leading to more carbon emissions and a hotter planet? As hard as international negotiators have tried to reach an agreement to phase out coal (and despite the promise of a historic breakthrough at the COP26 in Glasgow), so far, all attempts to get the world to phase out coal have failed. More recently, in response to the war Russia started against Ukraine, even the countries that had given up on coal have been revising their stance.
The most common concern voiced with phasing out coal is that it would be too costly. We are told replacing coal with renewable energy would be too expensive. We have undertaken a systematic quantitative analysis of this claim and obtained a baseline estimate that phasing out coal would bring the world a net total gain of £77.89 trillion. This represents around 1.2 per cent of current world GDP every year until 2100. We call this the “Great Carbon Arbitrage”.
