The real climate problem is not fossil fuel or CO2 or methane or the ocean rising or slow progress on batteries or …
The real climate problem is people — they are poor cooperators.
Of course, we all know that. It’s obvious. And there are several “known” solutions. These are called by such names as “political will” and now “ambition.” Both of these mean being willing to do more than you would do out of pure self-interest. It doesn’t take a special ambition or will to help yourself.
Cooperation doesn’t mean thinking only of yourself and hoping that when we are all greedy that will be best for the group. It means doing things because they help the group.
That’s altruism. So “political will” and “ambition” are code words for altruism. And we use these because everyone knows that:
Getting the countries of the world to be altruistic towards each other
is pretty close to rediculous.
There’s a way out of this dilemma
There are actually two ways out, but the easy one won’t work for the climate dilemma. It only works if there’s a government that can enforce agreements. But there is no such world government. Fortunately, Elinor Ostrom, a political scientist who was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in economics, showed that people have been using the harder method for centuries, often (not always) with great success.
So I got some colleagues to help me and we put together a book on how to do this. It’s a collection of papers by 13 different authors including three Nobel Prize economist, and it was published by MIT Press in June 2017.
I think you will find the list of authors quite impressive (except for the last one).
- David JC MacKay was Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Department of Energy
and Climate Change. - Joseph E. Stiglitz is the 2001 Nobel Laureate in Economics
- Jean Tirole is the 2014 Nobel Laureate in Economics
- Martin L. Weitzman is Professor of Economics at Harvard University
- William Nordhaus (2018 Nobel Prize) has been publishing papers on climate change since 1977
- Ottmar Edenhofer who served as Co-chair of WG III of the UN’s IPCC
- Also: Richard N. Cooper, Peter Cramton, Christian Gollier, Éloi Laurent, Axel Ockenfels, Ian Parry, and Steven Stoft
I am the last author mentioned, and also one of the book’s four editors, as you can see here on zFacts. Although I started this project back in 2006 and secured the first round of papers for the book, I do not have the high level of credentials of the other authors. But I did write the preface and chapter 4, which summarizes most of the ideas.
Click here to download the complete book as a FREE PDF (no signup requested). This was made possible by a grant from Axel Ockenfels’ Cologne Laboratory of Economic Research. The hard copy version is $35 at MIT Press, and the eBook is $24. Available also on Amazon.
Ripped Apart
I would like to use one of the figures relating to atmospheric CO2 in ppm from 1700 to 2050 that found online in one of my publications. How can I obtain permission to use this figure in a publication. Thank you in advance. Muralidhara Rao
You had a graph of the budget deficit and tax rates for different Presidents on the old website. Is that graph still available?