There is a widely held view that the cost of getting to Net Zero is going to be high.
We are told that the sums of money required for the new kit (solar panels, batteries, wind turbines, small modular reactors, high-voltage direct current interconnects, microgrids and the like) will be larger than a typical oligarch’s Loro Piana budget. Certainly, running into the trillions of dollars.
But is this really a large number in a sense of being either unaffordable or poor value for money? Yes, trillions are trillions. But global GDP is $85 trillion dollars. The US military costs about $2 trillion every three years. So in the context of military spending or the global economy, is trillions really a huge number?
The negative cost of Net Zero