Just look how they conclude. Pogge ends with a supplication:

The analysis shows that the problem of world poverty is both amazingly small and amazingly large. It is amazingly small in economic terms: The aggregate shortfall from the World Bank’s $2/day poverty line of all those 40 percent of human beings who now live below this line is barely $300 billion annually, much less than what the United States spends on its military. This amounts to only 0.7 percent of the global product or less than 1 percent of the combined GNIs of the high-income countries. On the other hand, the problem of world poverty is amazingly large in human terms, accounting for a third of all human deaths and the majority of human deprivation, morbidity, and suffering worldwide.

Most of the massive severe poverty persisting in the world today is avoidable through more equitable institutions that would entail minuscule opportunity costs for the affluent.

While Held concludes with a warning:

It is highly improbable that the multilateral order can survive for very much longer in its current form. [...] Instead, the test of deliberative generalisability needs to be built into reflections on “ways forward” in order to help ensure a focus on global solutions to global challenges – not just American, French, British, German, European Union, Chinese solutions. In other words, we require a multi-perspectival mode of forming, defending and defining political preferences – a mode that is in fact, other- and future-regarding.

The plight of the global poor is disheartening, even enraging… but arguments from injustice do not appear to serve as an efficacious ‘reason to act,’ certainly not ones that can motivate states to make even ‘minuscule sacrifices.’ Whereas the regime-theorist can encompass justice issues within the larger question of legitimacy, demonstrate not our moral responsibility but our mutual interdependence and the potential dangers large-scale inequalities bring to bear on our common world, and show the necessity, rather than the desirability, of solutions to address them.

DarkForest asks:

Lets say that everything went electric. Cars, power plants, factories, everything. How many nuclear plants (using current technology) would we need to produce?

The first answers are straight mathematical computations from the backs of napkins, and we get estimates ranging from 1000 to 4100 regular nuclear plants, to 200 thorium plants. Then somebody chimes in with the energy efficiency argument. Basically, increasing efficiency is cheaper than increasing capacity, and the return on investment for energy-efficient light-bulbs is three times as high as the most efficient solar installation. He advocates:

[A]doption of public policy that rewards end-use efficiency and penalizes inefficiency, so that we actually end up with the same or better end-use services [than increased carbon/nuclear production] while driving total energy demand down.

This is straight out of Amory Lovins’ Soft Energy Paths. I love this argument, because I love the clever turn back to economic efficiency justifying green policy, rather than pitting industry against the environment. But it doesn’t stop there.

Someone with the deeply satisfying screenname ‘Dasein‘ chimes in to argue against efficiency. “Money that is saved through efficiencies is reinvested in new energy-intensive applications,” he says. He goes on to explain:

You change your old appliances for new, energy-efficient ones. You change all your lightbulbs to compact fluorescents. As a result, you save $200 a year on energy, say. Do you just put that in a bank account? No, you buy a flight to Hawaii. Has your CO2 footprint gone down? If the power had been produced by a nuclear station, it might just have gone up.

A business invests in energy efficiency and saves a million dollars a year at its factory. What does it do? It drops prices on its products, allowing it to sell more for the same profit, and put the savings towards expanding capacity. Lower prices mean more people buy more of the product. Gains in efficiency are offset by increases in absolute production enabled by the efficiency.

I have to be honest: I’ve never thought of this before. It’s an extension of the basic Heideggerian argument about efficiency, which is that when we get into the mode of treating things like ‘standing reserve’ we’re completely constrained by this limitless attempt to store and harness the world, rather than letting it be. I think that might be right… but this is the first time I’ve ever seen it translated back into economics! The same thing seems to hold for gasoline usage, which is actually responsive to prices and thus cannot be curtailed through hybridization alone. Economists call it the ‘rebound effect,’ and the initial Lovinsian (who goes by flabdablet) responded with this report: apparently, no more than 40% of energy saved through efficiency is reinvested, and with automobiles it’s less than that: 10-30%, probably.

Sadly, that report depends on single sector evaluations of energy usage. It doesn’t measure the increased usage of gasoline due to space cooling efficiencies, for instance. While some people might work less if their energy bill was smaller, markets in general find ways to absorb efficiencies into increased productivity. This is easiest to see in industrial increases in efficiency, but it’s really just an effect of the way currency circulation constantly invokes energy expenditure, usually through the increased production and transportation of goods.