Denialists tell us to despair: solving Global Warming will make dire global poverty worse, because we can't afford enough clean energy to make the poor prosperous. Economist William Nordhaus has said otherwise, and now we have the data. Nobel Prize winner and Yale Professor Nordhaus won the prize for integrating climate change into long-run macroeconomic analysis.
Actually, going over to cheaper renewables, EVs, and so on is one of the best things we can do for the poor. But that does not mean telling them to buy gas guzzling cars, or running diesel buses in their cities, or using oil for heating, as many of the Denialists claim they must.
The lying, black-hearted Denialists also claim that we can't ask the rich to cut back on their lifestyles of wretched excess/conspicuous consumption, and more generally that nobody can afford to go over to cheaper renewable energy, sustainable buildings, and electric vehicles and so on. So we should throw up our hands.
This New Yorker article took on this virulent form of bogosity earlier this year.
The False Choice Between Economic Growth and Combatting Climate Change
In 1974, the economist William Nordhaus described the transition from a “cowboy economy” to a “spaceship economy.” In the former, he wrote, “we could afford to use our resources profligately,” and “the environment could be used as a sink without becoming fouled.” But, in the spaceship economy, “great attention must be paid to the sources of life and to the dumps where our refuse is piled.” He added, “Things which have traditionally been treated as free goods—air, water, quiet, natural beauty—must now be treated with the same care as other scarce goods.” Toward the end of his landmark paper, “Resources as a Constraint on Growth,” Nordhaus discussed the possible adverse effects of energy consumption, most notably the “greenhouse effect.”
Nordhaus went on to publish a series of foundational studies on the economics of climate change. In 1992, he created an integrated economic and scientific model that could be used to determine the most efficient ways to cut greenhouse-gas emissions. His work—and that of many other economists who followed his lead—showed that a low tax on carbon, set to rise slowly over time, could be enough to keep emissions at reasonable levels, saving us from climate change at little, if any, cost. A “spaceship economy” could thrive if governments made sure that companies paid an appropriate price for the environmental damage they caused—what would come to be called the social cost of carbon.