Popular policy

If CO2 really is the threat to our way of life, and even to our species, as Al Gore and the Stern report claim, how should we deal with the problem? And perhaps more importantly, how do we decide what to do?

The root of our climate (and many other environmental problems) boils down to us humans being bad stewards. There are too many of us using too many resources, living in an unsustainable way. There are ethical problems with reducing our numbers, and ethical problems with telling others to live sustainably, especially when we don't. We can't really say to India and China "oops--you can't industrialize and emit CO2 because we already did!" That just wouldn't fly.

Popular proposals to address the excess forcing from our emissions of greenhouse gasses are frequently based on shaky science. It is unclear that anything so far proposed--including this week's proposal to increase the Earth's albedo by breeding crop plants with higher albedo--will actually do anything either in the short or long term. A lot of popular policy proposals are based on a single idea that may or may not be valid at longer timescales.

So, cementing technological solutions with policy decisions probably isn't the best idea. At best we'll get an idea that sort of works and will implement it further than is really useful while ignoring ideas that could be better--faster, cheaper, or just plain more successful. This really is a situation where policy should focus on creating market mechanisms that will encourage (or force) environmental solutions without picking a winner.