Copenhagen

It boggles my mind that policy makers in the West are so resistant to doing much of anything to tackle climate change. I’m a firm believer that human activity is changing the climate, and that the risks to humanity are grave. But lets for a moment assume that climate change is in fact not real. The variations we are experiencing are in fact natural variations in the earth’s climate, or the result of sun spots, or whatever other theory you would choose to substitute.

Both Europe and America have overwhelming security incentives which should be encouraging them along the path of non-fossil fuel energy. The US imports a massive quantity of fossil fuels each year, and even if this is not directly subsidizing regimes such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, US demand drives up world prices which benefits some of America’s greatest adversaries while harming its own economy. The Europeans are in a similar boat, being beholden to Russia for gas supplies. The Russians have demonstrated that they are not opposed withholding energy in order to strengthen their negotiating position. Add on to that the likely increase in prices of those fossil fuels when the world economy starts to actually recover, and there is yet another incentive to be moving away from fossil fuels as quickly as possible.

China and India have similar, yet different interests in moving away from fossil fuel based economies. While energy prices will have some impact on their economic growth, their concerns should stem mainly from the ecological impact, with an added security focus for China. Since both China and India have populations of over one billion, the future demands for energy will be staggering. China continues to build coal power plants at a rate of at least one per week, in addition to the other energy generation infrastructure they are building. The ecological costs of this are staggering, and sooner or later will have to be addressed. There is little point in 10% economic growth per year if a decade or two down the road you need to spend all the gains on cleaning up your polluted country.

China also has increasing energy security concerns. The country has gone form a net exporter of oil to a net importer coinciding with its rising economic power. Chinese oil in transit is protected by the US navy, which makes their government nervous. For a government so concerned with sovereignty, shifting to domestically produced energy resources should be a high priority.

Added to this, there is the economic incentive which should motivate those countries with an existing research infrastructure and capital to allocate. The market for energy is huge and growing. The technologies for creating renewable energy, even if they are not able to replace power generation facilities in the developed world still represent a large market. So much of the world lacks transmission infrastructure, so there is a large market for renewable energy in areas which are not already connected to the grid.

Self interest alone should be sufficient to spur the largest emitters to action.
But going back to the assumption that climate change is real, we are not talking about saving the planet. Earth will continue to orbit the Sun, and support a great deal of life no matter the climate. What we are in fact talking about is saving human civilization as we know it.