I haven’t read the linked article or summary in detail, but clearly any measure of “success” must measure the costs of these policies as well? At least a quick skim seems to suggest the article didn’t account for costs at all, which I feel like makes this abstraction kind of meaningless (since it basically means that the “most successful” ones will simply be the ones that were the ones that covered the largest countries/industries, but that doesn’t tell us much, since that’s also where the potential costs were located).
It still seems good to do these calculations, but I would feel very hesitant to call these policies “successful” without having measured their costs.
A much better measure of “success” would be something like “Co2 averted”/”economic costs” * “size of intervention”.
I haven’t read the linked article or summary in detail, but clearly any measure of “success” must measure the costs of these policies as well? At least a quick skim seems to suggest the article didn’t account for costs at all, which I feel like makes this abstraction kind of meaningless (since it basically means that the “most successful” ones will simply be the ones that were the ones that covered the largest countries/industries, but that doesn’t tell us much, since that’s also where the potential costs were located).
It still seems good to do these calculations, but I would feel very hesitant to call these policies “successful” without having measured their costs.
A much better measure of “success” would be something like “Co2 averted”/”economic costs” * “size of intervention”.
I think you probably want:
Your equation will give an infinite score to a policy which could avert 1 gram of CO2 for zero cost, even if it was totally non-scalable.
Oops, yep, that sure is the better functional representation.