Here, neglectedness is taken as a reason for tractability, while it should be a reason for marginal cost-effectiveness.
No sorry that’s incorrect. These are two separate points.
Clean energy R&D is neglected because only $22 billion globannually are invested—Norway could in theory triple this if they wanted to and it would have a very large effect on global emissions.
Carbon taxes are also neglected. But if Norway were to implement a carbon tax the effect on global emissions would be tiny.
Increasing public clean energy R&D does not necessarily require strong multilateralism or harmonized national policies. This makes it very tractable politically and uniquely positioned in the space of all climate policies as a decentralized approach.
Even if clean energy R&D spending would be relatively higher (say 100 billion), it might still be more tractable for a small country to increase it than to implementing carbon taxes.
Ah, I assumed the latter was a consequence of the former because they were in the same paragraph, my bad.
However, like Michael, I’m still a bit confused about the role neglectedness is playing in this analysis (and all other analyses). But don’t take that as criticism of your analysis. It often seems that neglectedness and tractability (and scale) are used as independent reasons to support a particular cause area or intervention, rather than that they are used as a coherent framework. It seems to me your argument would have been similarly strong if clean energy R&D was not neglected—if you could just show that additional spending would have big benefits.
No sorry that’s incorrect. These are two separate points.
Clean energy R&D is neglected because only $22 billion globannually are invested—Norway could in theory triple this if they wanted to and it would have a very large effect on global emissions.
Carbon taxes are also neglected. But if Norway were to implement a carbon tax the effect on global emissions would be tiny.
Increasing public clean energy R&D does not necessarily require strong multilateralism or harmonized national policies. This makes it very tractable politically and uniquely positioned in the space of all climate policies as a decentralized approach.
Even if clean energy R&D spending would be relatively higher (say 100 billion), it might still be more tractable for a small country to increase it than to implementing carbon taxes.
Ah, I assumed the latter was a consequence of the former because they were in the same paragraph, my bad.
However, like Michael, I’m still a bit confused about the role neglectedness is playing in this analysis (and all other analyses). But don’t take that as criticism of your analysis. It often seems that neglectedness and tractability (and scale) are used as independent reasons to support a particular cause area or intervention, rather than that they are used as a coherent framework. It seems to me your argument would have been similarly strong if clean energy R&D was not neglected—if you could just show that additional spending would have big benefits.