A virtual global carbon price enabling engineers to drive essential and rapid decarbonization

Climate change is now an infrastructure challenge. Within the next 30 years our energy generation must switch from fossil fuels to renewables (IPCC, 2022). New buildings need to be zero-carbon and existing buildings need to be retrofitted (IPCC, 2022). Our global transportation network will need to be transformed. Delivering the Net Zero world is an engineering challenge (Clarke and Maslin, 2022). But to do this we need a globally agreed virtual carbon price so that every single infrastructure project can be assessed in terms of its impact on carbon emissions and thus planetary health. We propose a loss and damage-based carbon price that is enhanced (or reduced) by variable, national impact factors. Carbon intensity weighting would further increase the price's impact.