<i>there is indeed an analogous dynamic here to Pascal&#x27;s Wager: just as you ask &quot;which God&quot;, one could ask &quot;which emergency?&quot;</i><p>Is it an analogous dynamic if the cure for almost all of the emergencies in the basket is reduction in harmful levels of pollution including inefficient farming&#x2F;manufacturing&#x2F;transport methods, noting the associated benefits such as food security that comes with unpolluted waterways in poor villages, not acidifying oceans, not tainting arable land with heavy metals etc? Belief in a certain God among many seems more variable than <i>reduce pollution, aim for zero.</i><p><i>if we took immediate action on the crisis global poverty and got everyone up to Western living standards, that would conflict with the goal of reducing our environmental load</i><p>You make an interesting point - the big one is India which needs cheap energy to bring itself up from having no clean running water, no integrated sewerage system and severe poverty to competing with Europe and the Americas who have reaped the benefit of cheap [polluting] energy for a long time and before emissions were taxed.<p>But I see it as a benefit, at least in the long term, to start from this stage. Just as African countries have benefited from mobile networks and services like M-Pesa money transfer and microfinancing, never having to deal with maintaining an aging wired telecom infrastructure - India could reap the benefits of starting with a peer-to-peer energy network using residential solar, similar to what Germany has implemented. Of course this would need to be supplemented, however using fewer base load power stations than if it were purely centralized energy production.