The Climate Question · Investigation · Cost
Is it too expensive to fix?
'Too expensive' is a comparison — expensive compared to what? The cost of acting collapsed (renewables are now the cheapest new power); the cost of inaction is a rising bill of billion-dollar disasters.
FACT
§2 · Thesis
The strongest card in the deck — 'too expensive' — expired without being retired: the prices moved, the talking point didn't.
Cost of acting: documented and low. Cost of inaction: documented and large. Net comparison: a well-supported model.
The number
~90%
the drop in utility-scale solar's cost since 2010 (onshore wind ~70%). Solar and wind are now the cheapest source of new bulk electricity, unsubsidized (IRENA; Lazard).
IRENA; Lazard LCOE+
§5 · Graded Claim
New solar and onshore wind are the cheapest sources of new bulk electricity, even unsubsidized — below new gas and coal.
FACT
Lazard's standard LCOE analysis and IRENA agree; Lazard notes costs ticked up recently but remain the lowest for new generation. 'Renewables are expensive' describes the market of 15 years ago.
§5 · Graded Claim
Renewables are already avoiding large fossil-fuel costs — on the order of USD 480 billion in a single recent year (IRENA).
FACT
Cheaper to build and already displacing more expensive, volatile fuel — a present-tense saving, not a future promise.
§5 · Graded Claim
The cost of inaction is documented too: the U.S. alone has sustained hundreds of billion-dollar climate disasters totaling trillions, with the count rising.
FACT
NOAA NCEI's tally is an accounting of costs already incurred — the half of the ledger 'too expensive' leaves off. (Single-event attribution is probabilistic; the tally is a cost accounting.)
§5 · Graded Claim
Major assessments find acting costs less than inaction over time — but this is a MODEL (discount rates, damage functions), graded PROBABLY TRUE, not FACT.
PROBABLY TRUE
The measured pieces (cheap renewables, rising disaster costs) are FACT; the net-benefit conclusion built on top is a well-supported projection (IPCC AR6 WGIII 2022; IEA net-zero analyses) — we don't dress a model up as a measurement.
Declassified
The honest remainder: cheapest to build is not whole-system cost — storage, backup and transmission raise it.
§6 · Record vs Narrative
Count both ledgers, not one.
Cost of acting
- Cheapest new generation, unsubsidized (Lazard, IRENA).
- Prices down ~90% solar / ~70% wind since 2010.
- ~$480B/yr in fossil-fuel costs already avoided.
Cost of inaction
- Hundreds of U.S. billion-dollar disasters (NOAA).
- Trillions in cumulative damage; rising count.
- Fuel-price volatility the status quo keeps.
§7 · Why it matters now
The one honest remainder is the next question.
'Too expensive' was the strongest card and the prices retired it — except for the real remainder that a reliable grid costs more than the cheapest new panel. That remainder is the bridge to the next spoke: do the objections to solar and wind — intermittency, land, materials, reliability — actually hold up?
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▦ Ledger gaps
Help us fill these lines.
- OpenWhole-system cost of a reliable high-renewable grid — the objections-to-solar-and-wind spoke.
- OpenThe distributional costs on specific fossil-fuel workers and regions, and how they're handled.
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