Climate Crisis

Awareness of global warming is growing quickly in the U.S., as Al Gore's book and movie, An Inconvenient Truth, proves very popular among young people. I saw it with our local chapter of Net Impact, which also had a book-group discussion on the same topic. I've also visited the companion website and tried out the carbon calculator there. The most common reaction I've heard to the movie is a new appreciation for the seriousness the "climate crisis" combined with a feeling of frustration that we can't do more. Of course, we can each reduce our own carbon footprint - but one of the messages of the movie is that incremental change isn't going to be enough. So naturally, people want to know how large-scale change can happen, and the official U.S. stance on the Kyoto Treaty isn't very heartening.

Most recently, however, I saw in the August 16 Financial Times that Jagdish Bhagwati (well-known economics professor and author of In Defense of Globalisation) is suggesting an alternative international regulatory structure. He sees the deadlock as stemming from India and China's insistence that they did not cause the CO2 problem in the first place and others' insistence that they are causing it now; in Bhagwati's economics jargon, they are responsible not for the "stock" but for the "flow" of CO2 emissions. He believes that implementing a fee for CO2 production could create a fund for solving the problem, and could also tax those who produce from now on. Past behavior could be dealt with separately, perhaps through a mechanism similar to the Superfund.

It's an interesting suggestion, and has some common sense to it. I'm not completely certain it would work, as there are a dizzying number of factors in these multinational negotiations - but I'm glad to see a big-picture solution suggested by someone in a position to do so.