Second Life

Calling for a new paradigm to deal with climate change, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger advocate:

a new military-industrial-academic complex around clean-energy sciences, similar to the one we [the US] created around computer science in the 1950s and '60s. ...The goal would not be to subsidize clean energy in perpetuity, but rather to make the kinds of investments that ultimately bring the real price of clean energy down to the price of dirty-energy sources like coal in places like China. Doing all this will require a more optimistic narrative [than] Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. ... Cautionary tales ...tend to provoke fatalism, conservatism and survivalism ...not the rational embrace of environmental policies. Second Life: a manifesto for a new environmentalism, 'The New Republic', 24 September

I would add 'resignation, cynicism and despair'. Climate Stability Bonds as a way of dealing with climate change could be that different paradigm: under a Climate Stability Bond regime, people would be rewarded for stabilising the climate, however they do so. Kyoto conforms to the miserabilist paradigm that has spectacularly failed to address the problem. It punishes, people for doing something that (probably) does contribute to climate change. The costs are upfront, complex, administratively expensive. Any benefits are almost certainly going to be negligible and will take decades to appear. A Climate Stability Bonds regime would encourage people or governments to invest in exactly the ways that Nordhaus and Shellenberger advocate. It would focus on the outcome we all want to see: a stable climate; rather than the means of reaching it. Or the supposed means, for as James Lovelock puts it:

A rapid cutback in greenhouse gas emissions could speed up global warming, the veteran environmental maverick James Lovelock will warn in a lecture today. 'Daily Telegraph' 29 October