This year has provided a grim preview of what climate scientists say the world is becoming. Suffocating heat in the Pacific Northwest killed 200 people. Torrential rains and flooding across Europe killed at least 200 more. In New York, smoke from western wildfires turned the sun red; in Madagascar, people ate locusts to stay alive as croplands turned to sand.

Almost every country on Earth has pledged to slash carbon emissions to slow the gears of global warming. The Biden administration has promised a “clean energy revolution” that would make the United States carbon-neutral by 2050. The European Union has proposed ending the sale of gas-powered vehicles by 2035.

But in the race to cut carbon emissions, Costa Rica has been leading the way. It adopted its own plan in 2019, promising to show the world what a net-zero carbon future could look like. Its plan would transform almost every facet of its economy, from car sales to cattle farming. A recent RAND analysis found that might be what it takes to break our reliance on carbon—and it might make Costa Rica tens of billions of dollars richer.

“Many people might assume that this is a big investment for a return that's quite uncertain and based far out in the future,” said David Groves, who led the project as a senior policy researcher at RAND and is now with the World Bank's Climate Change Group. “But our No. 1 finding is that, for a country like Costa Rica, the net benefits are very likely to be positive.”

Read the full article about cutting carbon emissions by Doug Irving at RAND Corporation.