Climate Policy

[eppie]

Since the Socialized Health Care thread descended into Cap & Trade and climate discussion, I thought it might be good for the topic to have it's own thread. I was reading in the BBC today that a group of academics have written a letter to the G8 nations calling for a new direction in Climate Change policy, since the current policies (Kyoto, EU Cap & trade) are not reducing carbon emissions. From the Institute on Science, Innovation, and Society from Oxford University, How to Get Climate Policy Back on Course. Which is the sequel to their prior paper called, The Wrong Trousers; Radically rethinking climate policy. <blockquote>"The Kaya Direct Approach improves efficiency and reduces costs. These are happy outcomes which reliably translate into greater profitability. These will therefore always be policies that will not be regretted, even if the relationship between CO2 and global warming turns out to be different from that which current politics assume."</blockquote>This is the type of societal thinking that examines the consequences of policy changes rather than setting emissions targets, which result in squishing the big global economic bag in one direction without heeding the net consequences.

Wow guys, that is a lot of reading material.

I think there are many ways of reducing energy consumption and using more sustainable energy for costs that are anyway much lower than other many other strange schemes that governments spend their money on.

But apart from all the technical and theoretical discussions, the most important is to get people to agree with these policies in order to support the politicians who want to change things. And not only because of global warming (true or not) but also because of an ending oil supply and problems feeding all the people on the globe.

Here I am actually very negative; I don't see how we can convince all Indians and Chinese to stop using so much energy, especially because we are still using many times per capita than what they are. In other words, if all chinese and indians agree upon using less energy....even when they would use 10 % per capita of what we would use, we would still be in big trouble (and the thought of them agreeing to using less energy while we just continue to use so much is just ridiculous).