:: “Everyone will benefit from an effective response so everyone should share in the cost.” ::
And, HERE, we see the problem; there is no “sharing of costs”. As long as the developed counties (AKA: Capitalist and semi-capitalist) send “Climate Change” money to the “turd” world everything will be better.
You want to make the electrical-power industry of this country and every industrialized country in the world both cost-efficient and carbon neutral?
Go Nuclear. But not uranium-fueled light-water plants, instead, get the manufacturing kinks ironed out and start building thorium-fueled molten salt plants. The chief production of any atomic pile is heat energy, lots of it, produced reliably and continuously, which is used to heat water to steam and drive steam turbines, which then do the actual generation of electricity.
Uranium-fueled plants are, by their very nature, quite large and cannot operate efficiently or reliable if less than a certain optimal size. Add to that the byproducts of the “burning” of uranium, which are radioactive isotopes and elements that can remain radioactive for millennia, requiring long-term storage, a prospect that has never been realized.
Thorium-fueled plants, on the other hand, do NOT produce these long-lived elements and isotopes, but in fact, have the surprising capability of using this long-term radioactive “waste” as sort of a sparkplug to ignite their own reaction, and in doing so, “burn up” all these stores of radioactive waste, eventually eliminating them forever.
Thorium-fueled molten salt plants also have vastly more flexibility as to size and practical location near the point of usage of the electricity, because of a safety factor in that there are NO long-term radioactive waste products, nor is the “China syndrome” of a uranium-fueled plant even possible, or a break in the containment on the order of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.
We have the technology, and for much less than the cost of “cleaning up” coal-fired plants, we can have these sources on line and producing power within the decade.