What Will It Take to Mitigate Climate Change?

Pessimistic articles on climate change like this one from yesterday’s New York Times always get me thinking: what can we be doing to cut back on fossil fuel emissions? Obviously this is a tough problem in a number of ways, principally politically, but those challenges vary markedly from country to country. To take the most obvious examples, consider the U.S. and China, the two largest polluters.

The U.S. is a wealthy country that could be investing heavily in R&D for renewables and efficiency solutions, and actually would be if it weren’t for incredible amounts of dollars the oil companies spend annually to ensure they can pursue business as usual with a minimum of pesky regulations.

By contrast, China is a poor country. Fortunately, it is one that faces an enormous level of scorn if it doesn’t find a way to turn this around; the international community, as well as its own people, already regard the current quality of their air as unacceptable. I don’t know much about these people, but it’s fairly obvious that they don’t like looking foolish or inept in the eyes of the world.  Evidence of this came just two weeks ago when the Chinese government shut down a huge percentage of the industry in and around Beijing so that, upon his visit, U.S. President Obama could see across the street.

In any case, even given the recent U.S./China accord on the subject, most climate scientists tell us that this will be “too little too late.”

But here’s something to ponder: do we need to project a long, roughly linear decline in coal consumption over the next 50 years? I doubt it. I’m not a believer in miracles, but I’m a huge believer in the Black Swan effect, i.e., the notion that generally, we humans grossly underestimate how frequent and how powerful unforeseeable effects really are.