Studies indicate that dealing with the effects of climate change is going to be far more expensive than averting it in the first place. This "expense" is an illusion.
> little consolation to the thousands of lives lost every decade in that country to natural disasters and disease
Climate change is also going to cause tremendous human misery in the form of floods, fires, increased temperatures, harvest failures, and so on. Places like Haiti are going to be the worst hit.
The cost of solar is now about half what they spent.
And if nobody does anything, in a generation the main export will be refugees.
Solar energy (and you left out, crucially, storage) still isn't feasible for the worlds poor yet, though it is the obvious solution to the problem.
My biggest issue with advancements in solar power + storage is that because so much R&D is happening out West, everyone builds for grid tie use cases.
Can't help but think we'd be much further along if we assumed the current grid didn't exist at all (which might as well be true for the worlds poor)
We can work on environmental issues and poverty.
Economic growth will then follow if there is a semi skilled population.
After the earthquake in Haiti billions poured in but much of it disappeared into corrupt hands.
But, who knows, maybe corporations could run a country better than corrupt politicians —at least as it transforms.
Source?
Instead, this money is going to pool in upper class first world green economies as they use it to buy expensive electric cars, install expensive solar panels, and fund expensive climate change activists. That their efforts might slightly reduce the number of hurricanes in a hundred years is little consolation to the thousands of lives lost every decade in that country to natural disasters and disease, otherwise be preventable if the population wasn't living in shanty towns.