The Policy Problem From Hell: Climate Change
In many ways, climate change as a policy problem is the policy problem from hell. For the residents of the West Coast, the historic wildfires probably feel like hell.
That is because of some inescapable facts about what is going on around us.
No matter what set of solutions you take, significant groups of the common people and the elites alike have substantial amounts to lose in the answers, and people approach climate change as a chance to implement their own versions of “utopia.”
For starters, climate change is fundamentally about greenhouse gas emissions, not about capitalism, socialism, the makeup of races, God’s wrath, or communism.
Love or hate billionaires as much as you want, but the crisis in front of human civilization is not fundamentally about them. It is about the fuel used to power human civilization changing weather patterns around the world to make it more hostile to human civilization.
Put it another way, even if you got rid of billionaires/rich people and kept fossil fuels as the power for today’s civilization, the climate crisis would still be happening.
Keep in mind that the Soviet Union was powered by fossil fuels just like the United States, and before its economy crashed in under Maduro due to catastrophic mismanagement and corruption at the highest level, Venezuela’s economic boom was fueled by high oil prices.
In fact, carbon emissions are climbing fastest in the developing world as their standards of living rise, especially in India and China.
Meanwhile, emissions in the developed world are decreasing but nowhere near fast enough.
Fortunately, solutions to the climate crisis are in front of us: increasing the gas tax to discourage driving, genetically modifying food and livestock to be better prepared for a world changed by climate change, and rapidly switching over to nuclear energy. Nuclear energy is a power source that produces no carbon emissions and, more importantly, can power America’s metropolitan areas reliably no matter the situation.
Nuclear waste does not take up that much space, and considering the current situation with climate change, it is a gamble I am prepared to take. I am not worried about millennia; I am worried about the decades in front of me.
If anyone has a fuel source that can power American metropolitan areas and keep the US economy going at full capacity, let me know in the comments.
But I will add a few more things that I think would be a good idea.
Because of soil erosion and historic disasters damaging soil and other agricultural resources, it would be prudent to invest in urban agriculture, the process of growing good and livestock in urban areas in order to maintain a stable food supply and increase access to affordable healthy food.
The fact the United States is too divided to do something as simple as get COVID-19 eliminated or even under control does not indicate that it can successfully tackle an issue as complex and difficult as climate change.
To be clear, this is because a far-right media ecosystem has convinced millions of my fellow Americans that it is worth getting themselves killed to own the libs, an entrenched fossil fuel lobby, and the fact that so many of my fellow Americans are actively hostile toward scientific solutions like nuclear power or genetically modified crops and livestock.
Besides what I already suggested, I don’t know what else to suggest.