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For every economist, there exists an equal and opposite economist, and they're both wrong.

Like many jokes, this one is funny (to economists, anyway) because it's true. What isn't so funny is its application to the biggest challenge of the 21st century: How to shed a fossil-fuel energy infrastructure that seems hell-bent on destroying us. There are several camps trying to decide how much we must spend to avoid environmental disaster. Consensus on a grand total is a matter of degree, with estimates varying by as much as $8 trillion.

Geoffrey Heal, an economist at Columbia Business School, recently published a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper that asks what it would take - over the next 35 years - to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions to 80 percent below their 2005 level? That's not a made-up target: It's the goal the Obama administration submitted to the UN. It's also the long-term goal the U.S. will bring to G20 negotiations next week. And it shows up in the 2016 Democratic Party Platform upon which Hillary Clinton is running for president. (Republican candidate Donald Trump has rejected the science of global warming. Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson recognizes climate change and is open to†a carbon tax.)

Among scientists, however, there is agreement. Two Harvard economists, after trawling through voluminous, authoritative research, said last year that the odds of an utterly catastrophic finale to humanity's atmospheric experiment is about 10 percent. That's a conclusion that can focus minds pretty quickly - and perhaps turn the expenditure of trillions of dollars over three decades into only a tough, but manageable, problem.

Doing the math

Heal's main goal is to figure out, in a policy-agnostic, nonpolitical way, the economics of replacing 66 percent of U.S. energy output - the coal and gas used for electricity generation - with renewable energy or a combination of renewables and nuclear power. I wanted a way of doing it that was transparent,†Heal said, in which anybody who was interested in it can understand, and, if they disagreed, they can go back and do it their own way.â€

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