"The only way to shepherd the Green Deal to successful implementation will be to offer large fiscal transfers to the laggards, so that they, too, will have a stake in the clean-energy transition."



I believe this is absolutely correct, for all the reasons stated. It is also the element missing in the recent and also very good article by Jeffrey Sachs. Sachs and colleagues estimate that the cost of becoming roughly carbon-neutral by 2050 is a 1-2% GDP annual expenditure. And even this is considered an enormously daunting barrier in terms of political will. But the 1-2% is relative to the GDP of a wealthy country like US or Germany. For mid-level-wealth industrialized countries, and especially developing countries (South Asia?) who in fact have the biggest human need for increasing their access to energy, the %-of-GDP figure, and thus the political resistance, would be proportionally higher.