This became possible because the budget committees laid out their plans and
policy assumptions for future years in greater detail than they had generally done in the past.
They could have, by making product and universal life ethics training mandatory and misrepresentation
of policy assumptions and guarantees criminal and harshly punishable, have stopped this before anyone was hurt.
Challenges to mitigation for the purpose of defining SSPs do not include the stringency of the mitigation target itself or the choice of mitigation action, which are accounted for by two other aspects of the scenario matrix: the forcing level of the representative concentration pathway (RCP) and the
shared policy assumption (SPA), respectively.
The 3 degrees C result hinges on
post-2030 policy assumptions of the scenario, e.g. see the regional carbon prices as illustrated in Figure A. 1 in their analysis.
The World Energy Outlook does not offer a forecast of what the energy system will look like but instead presents various projections to 2040 based on
different policy assumptions, in order to give policy makers the tools to decide what path to follow.
And until we're willing to revisit
our policy assumptions through the real - world lens of politics, we won't be able to see the necessary path forward to grow and protect the work of previous decades.
It is for this reason that the scenario framework distinguishes between «pathways,» which describe one component (such as RCPs or SSPs) of integrated scenarios, and «scenarios» themselves, which combine pathways with other information such as emissions, climate projections and
policy assumptions to produce integrated descriptions of future climate and human system development.
In other words, it rests on
policy assumptions that are significantly beyond the ones that are being implemented.