IT’S TIME TO GO WAR AGAINST CLIMATE CHANGE

Why Solving Climate Change Will Be Like Mobilizing for War; And even then, victory is far from guaranteed.

Venkatesh Rad, October 15, 2015 (The Atlantic}

“…The December climate convention in Paris, COP 21, is shaping up to be the most significant since Kyoto in 1997. It might well…be an inflection point [for clean-energy technologies]…[T]he drama centers on government and UN technocrats…Rather than trusting market serendipity, climate experts are hoping that strong regulatory forcing combined with aggressive government investment in energy R&D will do the trick… Bill Gates makes a persuasive case for just this approach…[But] averting climate change will require such large-scale, rapid action, that no single energy technology, new or emerging, could be the solution. Neither could any single non-energy technology…The challenge therefore, is one of rapid, concerted deployment of a portfolio of emerging and mature energy and non-energy technologies. This means accepting a certain level of attendant risks…

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“Assuming we do manage to significantly accelerate deployment without cancerous levels of corporatist corruption, if emissions targets still remain out of reach, some growth must be temporarily sacrificed. At the same time, investment across the portfolio of energy technologies will need to continue…In other words, we are contemplating the sorts of austerities associated with wartime economies…Of the previous six energy revolutions of comparable magnitude—wind, water, coal, oil, electricity, and nuclear—only nuclear power had anywhere near the same level of early-stage technocratic shaping that we are contemplating…[but] there is only one successful precedent for the kind of technological mobilization we are contemplating: the mobilization of American industry during World War II…In the war against climate change, powerful technocrats will be far more consequential than energy-sector technologists…To the extent that energy technocrats are able to maneuver around bureaucratic inertia, investments at the levels suggested by Gates might pay off, and the response to climate change has a shot at success…Can this work? There’s a slim chance, but it’s probably the best chance we have…” click here for more

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