Bill Gates' book "How to Avoid a Climate Disaster" would be a great place to start.

Mitigation costs are expenses to prevent climate change.

Adaptation costs are expenses incurred because of climate change. Some of them are relatively easy to calculate like $200B to build a sea wall for New York City. Some of them are more handwavy -- what are the costs of mass migration? Most of these costs are incurred by farmers.

Bill Gates covers this extensively in his recent excellent book: How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. Even if all the rich world countries went to emissions zero, that wouldn’t be enough, because the developing world needs to continue to develop. This is a good thing but it is a problem of progress, and underscores how complicated the solution is

I really liked Bill Gates new Book: How to Avoid a Climate Disaster[1].
I liked that it shows what we have to do to get to 0 greenhouse gas emissions. What's the current state of technology and what's still left to do to get there.

I often find suggestions like "Meatless Monday" or "Only fly when really necessary" etc, while probably good, not really useful advice.
In Gates book he talks about that transportation and "building things" is good and we should not stop it, but instead find a way to make it emission free.

[1] https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/My-new-climate-book-is-fin...

Interesting. I'm surprised I didn't hear that solution mentioned in Bill Gates "How to Avoid a Climate Disaster" book.

He basically made the same battery weight argument and was pushing for alternative biofuels for planes, if I remember correctly. And that was just published earlier this year, and seemed pretty comprehensive about discussing all possible solutions, at least as far as I could tell.

Maybe just because it's (presumably) nowhere near the point where it could be feasible for commercial passenger planes?

I recently read Gates’ book How To Avoid a Climate Disaster which left me with the impression that the overriding factor in building costs is the energy required (and CO2 produced) for construction, heating, and cooling.

Unfortunately I didn’t see any mention of energy or carbon in this post.

Seems like the biggest breakthrough would be a pre-construction estimate of energy costs over, say, 30 years. Similar to the Energy Star sticker on appliances sold in the US which tell you the cost to run a given appliance with typical usage compared to the range for other models.

This would allow you justify spending more upfront for better insulation, HVAC, air sealing, etc. and recoup that over time. At scale this would allow our civilization to be more energy efficient and reduce the need to build more power plants.

This suggestion stood out:
”...move to resistance heating and thermoelectric cooling“

Unless I’m missing something, this would be a step backward. Modern heat pumps are 3-4x more efficient than resistance heating, since they aren’t creating heat but moving it from one place to another. For cooling, if the author is referring to Peltier type thermoelectric cooling, the same applies: heat pumps are many times more efficient.

The building revolution we need is one that cheaply produces extremely energy-efficient homes, IMO.

I recently listened to the audiobook of How to Avoid a Climate Disaster by Bill Gates. It was a fine tour of the landscape of solutions. My main takeaway is that we're going to need to do a wide variety of things in a wide variety of sectors. He gets into stuff like concrete, which is very important in growth but also big on emissions.

With respect to reforestation: Gates says it would help, but possibly not as much as you'd think and he's a bigger proponent of stopping the deforestation.

Yishan Wong thinks that growing forests (as opposed to just planting trees) is an important tool for carbon sequestration: https://www.terraformation.com/about