How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going

by Vaclav Smil

A commonly used climate-economy model indicates the break-even year (when the optimal policy would begin to produce net economic benefit) for mitigation efforts launched in the early 2020s would be only around 2080. Should average global life expectancy (about 72 years in 2020) remain the same, then the generation born near the middle of the 21st century would be the first to experience cumulative economic net benefit from climate-change mitigation policy.[61] Are the young citizens of affluent countries ready to put these distant benefits ahead of their more immediate gains? Are they willing to sustain this course for more than half a century even as the low-income countries with growing populations continue, as a matter of basic survival, to expand their reliance on fossil carbon? And are the people now in their 40s and 50s ready to join them in order to bring about rewards they will never see?