Cheap clean energy beats expensive fossil fuels

Climate mitigation debates often pit restrictions on fossil fuel supply (mildly confusingly for abundance readers, called “supply side policy” in the article) against efforts to make clean energy more competitive. Zeke Hausfather makes a convincing case that making clean energy cheap is more tractable, and therefore more effective, than making fossil fuels expensive. Hausfather argues that the 1.5°C target – which represents a probabilistic balancing of risk and achievability, not a tipping point – has become a political snare. The gas-vs-coal lifecycle analysis is worth a read on its own, arguing that you’d need implausibly high methane leakage rates (5%+ on a 20-year timeframe) for gas to be worse than coal.