Foundations of bone and sand

Twenty-five years after the world first moved to protect the ozone layer, British scientists have found three new potentially damaging gases in the atmosphere. While they do not expect the gases to do much damage to the ozone layer, think they may add to global warming. Threat from new gases found in air, Alex Kirby, 4 June

For years now I've been railing against building policy on fossilised foundations. To put it briefly, government does not know how best to achieve society's goals. When it looks at climate change it relies on science done in the 1990s; its policy is to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions - or rather, those gases identified as greenhouse gases more than 15 years ago. But what if, as I've been asking for not quite15 years, the science is wrong? Or outdated? The policymakers, true to form, have no answer except to continue building on crumbling foundations.

When society is changing so rapidly, when our scientific knowledge is expanding at an ever-increasing rate, then policy should target outcomes, rather than the supposed means of reaching them. A Social Policy Bond regime would do this. It would encourage diverse, adaptive approaches to whatever it identifies as the problems arising from, in this example, climate change. Our current policymaking system cannot adapt. It puts the interests of current organizations, be they public or private sector, first, and if it does build new organizations, it does so on ossified foundations.