Well, the White
House has just released the third iteration of the ‘National Climate
Assessment.’ One wonders at what point a
political critical mass will arrive actually so that we actually do something about climate change. The IPCC report released last month indicated
we need to ‘decarbonize’ our energy regime, and we have until about 2030 to do
so if we’re to avoid the worst scenarios of climate change. I like that word ‘decarbonize,’ though. It makes it very specific what we need to do,
and I find that very helpful. What do
you actually have to do to our energy system in order to start throwing a LOT
less carbon into the atmosphere? Energy
efficiency is one thing—accomplishing the same task with less energy. Switching to nonpolluting renewable energy is
another—wind, solar, geothermal, possibly even nuclear. But the big thing, politically, is that we’ve
got to start making the fossil fuel companies PAY for the carbon their products
are putting into the atmosphere; that’s right, we’re going to have to have a
carbon tax.
There’s one
other aspect of this situation that nobody wants to talk about: overpopulation. If you really want everybody to have a Western-style middle-class standard of
living, you can’t do it with seven billion human beings on this planet—let alone
the 10 billion or so that are estimated by 2050. I think this needs to become part of the
political discourse. I would start at
the local level, at the level of municipality, county, maybe state or small country. The question
is, are there too many people here? How
do we decide that? If we decide there
are too many people, what do we do about it?
Close down immigration? Restrict
childbearing?
