the cost of the future clean-up is, well, in the future and if not intangible, less tangible. Perhaps that should not be true, and people should be extrapolating the cost from recent disaster like the Cali and Aussie fires of the last couple of years, but human nature resists that idea. The tangible current costs of reducing run the gamut from the financial to the emotional (workers in fossil fuel industries seeing their lifestyles and livelihoods compromised).

Unfortunately, it is not empirical - this cost benefit analysis is purely emotional, which means for too many, it's all cost, no benefit. That's why you see such ambivalence, in spite of all the passion on both sides. I hate to say it, but if the worst predictions about climate change turn out to be true, humanity is as good as extinct, because that's out nature - we do not visualize the long terms like this. And I think that holds true of the younger generation that environmentalists so admire now - the generation basically still in school and in their 20s seems so much more hip to this, but as more and more of them have several kids, 2 cars and a mortgage, they too will probably begin to lose their passion for this. They're only human.

Best hope is that the future will not be as bad as the most dire predictions suggest. Because there ain't no way we will be carbon neutral by 2030, and I wouldn't bet on 2050 either.