https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/05/28/the-economic-cost-of-eliminating-fossil-fuels/
The debate on how much impact humanity has on climate change continues. As nearly everyone knows by now, there is no observational evidence that humans have a significant impact on climate, so the debate is mostly over which future climate projection is likely. It also isn’t clear that the changes we might cause are bad, most of the evidence suggests that additional CO2 and warming have been beneficial so far and will likely be beneficial in the future. But what if we do decide to eliminate fossil fuels? What is the economic impact?
Gregor Semieniuk, and nine co-authors have just published an open-access paper in Nature Climate Change discussing this option. The net present value of future lost fossil fuel profits exceeds $1.4 trillion, with $0.4 trillion lost in the U.S. alone. Compare this to the loss of about $2 trillion in U.S. home value during 2008, according to Zillow, due to the housing crisis. Note the two numbers are not directly comparable, as we are comparing fossil fuel profits to total home value, not homeowner’s equity. Average 2021 U.S. home equity is about $153,000 and the average cost of a home is about $374,900. This ratio reduces the $2 trillion-dollar 2008 loss in home value to a loss of 0.8 trillion in home equity. We could expect a serious economic shock from the loss of oil, gas, and coal assets.
Most of the risk falls on private investors who are overwhelmingly in OECD countries, especially in the U.S. and U.K. To better put this into perspective, the OECD GDP for 2021 was $59 trillion and the U.S. GDP was $21 trillion.