Questions of Massive Regulatory and Taxation Schemes Are Burning up at UN Climate Meeting

It’s great when you have 10,000+ members of the Cult of Climastrology taking long fossil fueled trips to tell us that fossil fuels are bad and we need lots of regulation and taxes on Other People

Why We Don’t Need a Moonshot to Solve Climate Change

The prospect of solving climate change often prompts grand metaphors of moonshots and the Manhattan Project, with top scientists dedicating time and energy to come up with a breakthrough that will solve global warming.

But that may not be necessary.

A wide range of scientists, engineers and thinkers agree that we have the technological capacity to stem warming, keeping temperatures below the 1.5°C target that scientists warn would bring some of the most catastrophic impacts of climate change. What we’re missing is not big technological improvements, but rather the right mix of policies and political will to implement them.

Other nutters think we need to “declare war” on ‘climate change’, but, anyhow, it’s strange that this always devolves into politics and forcing people to comply, eh? What the Warmists are debating in Poland is the so-called rule book, which would put in all sorts of rules that would harm the economies and middle/lower classes in producer nations while giving lots of money from producers to non-producer nations.

But the rulebook is just a small representation of a much bigger puzzle. Across the planet, efforts to address climate change have stalled because of a lack of policy and political will. Take carbon pricing, the policy most economists and policymakers say will serve as an important step to reducing emissions. Such a measure, which could take the form of a carbon tax or cap-and-trade system, would require companies to pay to pollute. The revenue could be used to support something like a green jobs program or fund a tax cut.

“It’s about making markets work well,” Nicholas Stern, former head of the British Academy and World Bank chief economist, tells TIME. “Markets can fail if people don’t pay for what they’re buying, and if you use fossil fuels you are causing big losses to other people.”

So, all the people who took fossil fueled trips to Katowice are causing big losses to other people? Huh.

But countries have struggled to find ways to make carbon-pricing efforts politically palatable. In Canada, where Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has tried to push through a national carbon-pricing scheme, the issue has become a controversial campaign talking point. This week French protesters succeeded in stopping President Emanuel Macron from implementing a gas tax, arguing that it was an out-of-touch policy that would hurt the poor.

Even in places where citizens are concerned about climate change carbon pricing discussion have devolved into fights over what form it should take. In Washington state, for instance, progressive voters rejected a carbon tax in 2016 because it funded a tax cut. This year, voters there rejected a restructured carbon tax because it lacked transparency. In Katowice, negotiators are trying to figure out how to make the nuts and bolts of how to make carbon-pricing work on an international level with deep disagreements about accounting and trading credits.

Hooray! People who took long fossil fueled trips from around the world want to figure out an international carbon tax, despite actual voters turning against them.

And then there are others who advocate for regulatory solutions that would simply ban or restrict activity that pollutes while directly funding programs that advance clean energy and other climate solutions. These solutions are in the vein of a Green New Deal, proposed by leading progressive voices, that would fund a large-scale U.S. green jobs program. Scientists say these efforts would reduce emissions, but the stringent opposition makes them politically challenging.

In other words, government forcing people to comply with the hardcore beliefs of cultists. These same cultists tend to be rich enough that their policies won’t hurt their own lives.

“The real economy is moving in one direction not even linearly but exponentially,” Christiana Figueres, the former head of the UN’s climate change program and a key framer of the Paris Agreement. “If there’s an alignment between politics and economy then of course things can move forward much quicker because all the stars aligned in the same direction.”

The trick, then, is getting those two things aligned.

Not a science. Pure politics.