Don't get me wrong, there are cases where the old way is better because it is cheaper and so they will use that. However they won't use gas cars since we are developing battery cars, solar panels, and the like. Within a few years electric cars will be better for them as well.
New technology will be adopted, but not fast enough. Bangladesh is currently at 4% renewables. But half the country doesn’t even have electricity. It’s building 10 GW of coal capacity by 2030 which will double per capita CO2 output. Gas is still the major energy source with some nuclear being built. There is nowhere to build solar or windmills, though off shore wind is a possibility in the long term. It will be many decades before Bangladesh uses primarily electric vehicles and vast numbers of ICE vehicles will be purchased in the meantime. The number of registered motor vehicles has tripled in the last decade—those are nearly all gas vehicles, and half are used vehicles imported from elsewhere. 80% are motorcycles, with very inefficient gas engines. And there are no alternatives to CO2-production for many construction and industrial processes.
Bangladesh will certainly take some measures to be greener. It has no economic incentive to use more fossil fuels than it needs to: it imports gas and coal and has no domestic industry or jobs in that area to protect. But it also can’t afford to subsidize renewables. It will deploy technologies based on true cost, and right now the cost of renewables + storage isn’t there, neither is the domestic infrastructure to go fully electric.
Citation very much needed. Everything I've read about global warming tells me the eventual GDP impact of 'business as usual' warming will dwarf everything else. It's not just the flooding. It's the rise in wet bulb temps, the droughts, the forest fires, etc. This does not magically end at 2100 just because our projections end there. This goes on for millenia.
I cannot fathom, how one could look at the facts and science and come to your conclusion.
To you this is an eventuality, to them the problems are right now, it is right now that they need electricity for the X million people without access to it, it is right now that they have to use huge amounts of concrete to build infrastructure, it is right now that they have to expand their transport/truck fleets to transport food to themselves or the million/several hundred thousands of Roinhya which arrived to the country in the last 2 years
Walk 100 miles in the other person's shoes
The mainstream “facts and science” does not support the conclusion that climate change will eventually “dwarf everything else” in the economy, not even for hard-hit countries like Bangladesh. The 1/3 number for Bangladesh by 2060 is one of the higher estimates I’ve seen, from Asian Development Bank. Others show less than 10%.
See also: https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/08/19/climate-ch... (“Climate change could cost the U.S. up to 10.5 percent of its GDP by 2100, study finds.”).
10% is a lot! It’s trillions of dollars, and it would be worthwhile to spend a significant amount of money to avoid it. But we need to pay attention to the science.
$1,000,000 5% over 80 years = $49,561,441.07
$1,000,000 4% over 80 years = $23,049,799.07
I don't even think the most outlandish have climate change being greater than 50% of GDP.
The good news is the problem will eventually take care of itself when North America doesn't want its old Nissan Leafs anymore. The bad news is the delay.
It's not up for them to try and learn from us, it's up to us to teach them.
Developing countries get their cars from developed countries. In 30 they will not have a choice about buying gas cars. 30 years is not that long on a global scale.
Your average Australian consumes many times over the co2 budget than a Bangladeshi, Sudanese or Nigerian combined
To reduce these emissions of the developed world is a far more important objective than Bangladeshis building a couple coal plants so they can give electricity to more than just 40% of their population
Europe and North America now account for well under 40% of CO2 emissions and their emissions are shrinking: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-re.... Emissions in the rest of the world, by contrast, are increasing exponentially. Within a decade or so, India alone will emit more CO2 than the EU.
The current CO2 budget for sticking to 1.5C is about 400 gigatons: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-why-the-ipcc-1-5c-repor.... North America and Europe could cut their emissions to zero tomorrow, and the rest of the world will easily blow through that within the next 20 years. China by itself will use up that whole budget by 2050 if not earlier.
Well, everyone everywhere right now keeps doing the stupid thing, despite knowing better.
That doesn't mean it's by any means guaranteed. But facing climate change is in their interest.
I wonder if a private investor could swoop in on a coal plant project, bankroll an upgrade to something better, and sell offsets on the carbon market in California?
Carbon capture will have to work because there will be no way to address climate change otherwise. Countries like India and everyone on the continent of Africa will industrialize, they will build vast structures out of concrete and they’ll use cheaper gas power cars and whatever energy they can get their hands on. My home country of Bangladesh will add a 80-100 million people and it’s GDP will increase by a factor of 5 by 2050. The idea that Bangladesh will jeopardize a single percentage point of GDP growth to make that growth carbon neutral as it rushes to bring middle income standards of living to its people is utterly absurd. The country’s CO2 emissions per capita has increased by a factor of five since I was born and it can increase by another factor of 10 before getting to the level of an efficient developed country like France. To compensate for massive CO2 output in those countries, developed countries will have to go carbon negative and capture that CO2.
It’s so obvious I’m not sure how so many people overlook it.