FEEDBACK: It's your call at COP26 - what would you do?
Hi everyone, I want to hear from you! This is about doing what’s necessary NOT what’s doable.
Let’s pretend you’re the final decision maker at COP26. You have full authority. You have access to trillions of dollars. You’re being guided by the science and not fossil fuel companies or billionaires. Promises of future technology are great but there needs to be an immediate reduction in emissions in order to buy time to hopefully find technological solutions.
You will likely lose your “mainstream” job but there’s an anonymous billionaire who has promised you a 500k US/yr. salary for doing what’s needed which has nothing to do with protecting the super elite’s wealth. In fact, the best gauge that you’re made the right decisions is the amount of vitriol that will come your way from the money hoarding elite.
What single initiative would you immediately implement to protect our carbon budget? What might be the unintended consequences and what could you do to mitigate them.
In case you missed it, here’s a link to yesterdays article, Will COP26 Will Be An "Epic Fail"?
Cheers,
Brad
I'm not sure how blue-sky or entirely plausible you wanted the answers to be, so take this with a grain of salt:
The ideas of a carbon tax or cap and trade were flawed from the outset as they allowed industries to game the systems and because they focussed on the carbon rather than the means by which the carbon was being created. The focus needs to instead be on the resources being depleted that lead to greenhouse gas emissions, as well as water tables and biodiversity. Assign a value to all those externalities that polluting corporations have used or impacted without paying, both inputs and outputs, from the water table and fuel inputs to carbon and pollutant outputs, as well as the on-flow effects of these.
Unite all of the national and international bodies that currently give due weight to climate change (and that includes the US military*) and, with them, demand that all of the world's natural resources be assigned governing bodies with full legally binding power under international law. The role of these bodies is to charge companies for resource use, commensurate with the impact of that resource's depletion and the resultant greenhouse gas emissions. Industries with long lead times will have time to divest and diversify, but much of the R&D has been done and been suppressed or is within current capabilities. Industries with higher impact will have much higher costs associated with failure to change.
In the case of the oil industry, for example, set an ambitious but realistic target for change to the extraction of minerals associated with battery technology and/or the manufacture of hydrogen and other alternative fuels and/or carbon capture and sequestration technologies, and facilitate this transition by assigning costs to failure:
Are you still extracting oil at that well at the end of this year? $1 million fine.
Are you still extracting oil at that well at the end of next year? $1 billion fine.
And the year after that? $10 billion fine.
Once there is an actual cost associated with the use of natural resources, rather than a theorized, some way off in the future cost to other people, then the cost-benefit analysis tips markedly in the favour of increased R&D and rapid deployment.
These bodies should also be tasked with actually facilitating the changes required. They can do this by working with these companies and corporations, providing current research and the individuals that can apply that research.
To note: the idea is to have these bodies focussing on small enough resources or regions that they are manageable and that there are enough such bodies that 'capture' by vested interests is not possible. So, for example, in a given region, there would be separate bodies for the water table, biodiversity, local human health and well-being and so on.
I had planned to sit down and write this over the weekend, but have just sat down and done it now, over the space of 20 minutes or so, so please excuse the scattered nature of the above.
*https://www.defensenews.com/pentagon/2021/01/27/climate-change-is-now-a-national-security-priority-for-the-pentagon/
Here is a link to something positive that is happening right now - lasting all week. World conference on solutions!!! So...... Time to stop moaning about the problem and do something. Hope you like it xxx First half hour looks AMAZING!!! https://hopin.com/events/daring-cities-2021