Climate Crisis Part 4: What to Do?

So far my climate crisis posts have been about declaring an actual emergency, the encouraging youth movement and joining the global climate strike on September 20th. Now I want to turn to the question of what to do.  Today’s post sets out four basic principles.

First, the “what” itself is quite simple: we have to emit dramatically fewer greenhouse gases going forward and we have to recapture a lot of our past emissions from the atmosphere. In other words, the good news is we know what we need to do. This may not strike people as all that reassuring, but compare that situation too many diseases where we don’t even have a clue as to what is causing the disease. It all rolls up neatly into clear KPIs, namely the ppm concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (measuring CO2 and methane separately).

Second, there is no one policy or technology that by itself will do the trick. There are no silver bullets here. Instead, we will have to do a lot of different things and we will have try many that people say can’t or won’t work. A lot of what we will try will in fact fail but that’s OK too. People who work with startups are familiar and comfortable with both of these ideas but bureaucrats generally are not. So if you think X can work, throw yourself at it and see what progress you can make.

Third, there are some policies that are obvious and need to be implemented quickly and that’s pricing in the externality of emissions. That can be accomplished either through a tax on carbon and methane emissions or a cap and trade scheme. There are lots of questions about details of implementation (including what to do with revenues generated), but it is hard to argue with the basic concept. Importantly, internalizing the emissions externality will not just make emissions more costly (thus reducing them via the price mechanism) it will also unleash a lot of entrepreneurial activity. Rather than try to sort out all the questions ahead of time, we should run lots of regional regulatory experiments and learn from each other.

Fourth, we need to understand that the level of global mobilization required here is akin to that during the World Wars (as well as subsequently during the Cold War). What we therefore need are administrations that are willing to tackle large scale infrastructure projects (e.g. public transportation, bicycle friendly cities, huge reflective surfaces), as well as back ambitious research projects, such as vastly expanding work on nuclear fusion. That kind of mobilization is hard because the threat still feels so diffuse (compared to the threat of another nation) but it is absolutely what we need.

Upcoming posts will dive deeper into policies and technologies. If you have a favorite that you want me to cover or comment on, now is a good time to let me know.