The problem with the issue of climate change (other than calling it “climate change”…)

The problem with the issue of climate change (other than calling it “climate change”…) is that for most of the folks who are trying to get something done, they’ve adopted a needless barrier that we get universal buy in to solve it. That preference for solidarity based policy alone has done more harm to the mitigation strategy than any other aspect of this issue.

What am I talking about? Well, there are multiple kinds of policies (I’m ripping this directly from Matthew Taylor’s RSA presentation on “The Power to Act”).

1. Solidaristic – we all agree to turn off the lights when we leave a room, and recycle our plastics.

2. Hierarchical (authority) – we ban the use of fossil fuels, or mandate catalytic converters, etc.

3. Market bases – we’ll compete to create better products, which reduce the reliance on the old ones, etc.

The environmental movement mostly focuses on #1 (probably arguing they need that to get #2, which is in absolute terms, bunk).

But really, I agree with Matthew Taylor, if we want to make any real progress, we need to properly balance all 3 (I’d actually argue, you only need to balance #2 and #3, and that #1 is a consequence of that balance, with Taylor’s 4th type – despair – being a consequence of failing to do that – the 4th one, sound familiar?)

What would that look like? Well, how about if instead of trying to use that old conservative punishment model, where we restrict what people want to do (burn coal), we instead provide incentives to produce the competing technologies more rapidly. There are 6 renewable sources of energy, and only 4 dirty sources. We already know the clean ones will be more efficient than the dirty sources, it’s just a matter of time. So lets accelerate that.

I know, I know, the “experts” say that it won’t be enough – well, the experts thought we couldn’t replace ozone depleting freon with anything else in refrigerators, and it took one congressmen, and a small cash reward, like a year to get 3 alternatives back in the 80s. So forgive my skepticism. (Honestly, I wish I could find a source for this – I heard it on the radio ages ago. Still, there are other examples of making the new thing cheaper, rather than making the old thing more expensive, and this is the clear direction we should be going.)

And yea, it’s true that we need to be a lot more about carbon capture/sinking. So let’s fund some efforts to do that using hierarchy. Let’s stop waiting for global buy in – what a waste of time. Let’s just start putting the money and market activity using authority to fix this. We don’t need buy in, we just need some smart people to do the work. Most of the smart people who could do this work, just want to pay their mortgage while they do it. It’s not even expensive.

Oh! That’s already happening. Even without scaring the next generation to death (seriously, they are petrified – that’s not helping), many countries are now (finally) starting to do exactly this.

Now let’s get Australia to remove their ineffective shark nets. Gawd those are dumb.