Dr. Kelly de Bruin:

Deputy Paul Murphy's point is very relevant. I agree that one can decouple economic growth in that sense. One can make really smart investments and have good economic growth in line with mitigation at the same time. However, the idea is that when one looks at emissions, one does so in terms of the number of people and how much they earn as that is how general baseline emissions work. There is always a link between the richer we get and the more we emit. In the case of no mitigation, one cannot decouple economic growth and emissions, they connect completely, but with mitigation efforts one can separate the two.

We are economists so we think about the costs. A lot of the emissions can be reduced relatively cheaply, or at a lower cost, whereas some emissions have much higher costs. That is also an issue, so that if one has economic growth there are also more of these high cost emission reductions.