Hi Jay, I’m still wrapping my head around how this should be dealt with. The inflation of emissions is related to the Social Cost of Carbon and I used the 1.4% from the Stern review. It is kind of like asking, what would you have paid to not emit that carbon last year, or 5, or 10 years ago. The required reductions in emissions is increasing every year, Carbon Brief provides this illustrative chart:
My whole career we have been trying to prevent carbonation of concrete - because once it carbonates, the steel corrodes, and then we are patching or rebuilding using even more concrete and producing more emissions. The argument that it will absorb CO2 seems absurd from this point of view, essentially forming quicklime so that it can reabsorb a portion of the emitted CO2 as useless lumps of rocks. All emitted CO2 influences the carbon cycle equilibrium point, whether we can survive at that equilibrium or it ends up as a Venus-like atmosphere is the worry. The climate models don’t include feedback loops as far as I’m aware, and if we started to include thawing of the permafrost, loss of albedo, ocean acidification and loss of blue carbon sequestation, etc. etc. then there would be a real inflation rate on the carbon emitted - likely much greater than 1.4%.