> It's not sufficient to tell people in western countries that they shouldn't drive SUVs or take long flights, you have to tell people in poorer (populous) countries that they can't have a better standard of living because doing so means more GHG.
No, we should tell them to leap frog the energy systems of the West and go straight to more efficient, cheaper (in medium to long term) energy sources like nuclear and solar. The same way many developing countries skipped over land lines and went straight to cellular for communications technology.
We should tell them with tariffs and economic sanctions if necessary. Renewables are cheaper (even when firmed with battery storage), there is no reason not to use them versus fossil fuels. You have to internalize the carbon emission costs into the economic system to encourage the desired outcome, otherwise humans will do the human thing: pollute with wild abandon when there is no cost to do so.
South Africa just commissioned a new coal plant expected to operate until 2075, one that will never turn a profit (for various reasons). It should be extremely economically painful for them to make such a decision, so much so that they revisit the depreciation schedule of the asset and alternatives.
Electric cars and renewable energy are cheaper in the long term than gasoline cars and fossil energy, but gasoline cars and fossil energy require less capital up front.
The problem is that the third world is short of capital. So lend them the capital at really good rates (0% for example). That'll make the adoption of green solutions a no brainer for them.
If the new renewable energy sources were really as good as advertised - not only cleaner than fossil fuels, but also so much cheaper as well - then this would indeed be both obvious and inevitable. China in particular has a lot of the world's capacity to produce renewable generation equipment, they shouldn't need to rerun the pollution of western countries to have prosperity and this would solve both their massive pollution problems and their need to find new infrastructure projects to fund in order to prop up the economy, both major political headaches domestically. Yet they keep on pointing to the West's emissions as justification for why they should increase CO2 output instead. They also don't have the NIMBY problems of some Western countries.
My general conclusion is that the reason for this is that switching to green energy is neither as easy nor as cheap as advertised. Sure, on paper the cost per GWh is great and you can even realise much of that for the first few projects, but the cost of dealing with a lack of dispatchability and of intermittency from sources like solar and wind ends up massively outweighing that in practice. So no-one actually wants to switch to an all-renewable grid.
Growing economies might install as much solar as they're able, but they can still be tempted to burn fossil fuels on top of that, to grow even faster. Limiting climate change is going to require moderation, which is a tough ask for capitalism...
No, we should tell them to leap frog the energy systems of the West and go straight to more efficient, cheaper (in medium to long term) energy sources like nuclear and solar. The same way many developing countries skipped over land lines and went straight to cellular for communications technology.