An alternative to the blah, blah, blah approach

The current Spectator using figures from Our World in Data, tells us how much 'carbon' the world was emitting at the time of previous climate summits:

1992, Rio  22.44 bn tonnes 

1997, Kyoto  24.19 bn tonnes 

2002, Johannesburg  25.91 bn tonnes 

2009, Copenhagen  31.46 bn tonnes 

2015, Paris  35.21 bn tonnes 

2021, Glasgow  (2019) 36.44 bn tonnes 

Taking greenhouse gases (ghgs) as a whole, more figures from Our World in Data confirm this trend: according to that source global emissions totalled 35.0 bn tonnes in 1990, rising to 49.4 bn tonnes in 2016.

The current Economist tells us that in 1992: 

78% of the world’s primary energy—the stuff used to produce electricity, drive movement and provide heat both for industrial purposes and to warm buildings—came from fossil fuels. By 2019 the total amount of primary energy used had risen by 60%. And the proportion provided by fossil fuels was now 79%. What the Paris agreement of 2015 meant, The Economist, 30 October

The same publication tells us that 1002 coal-fired electricity generating plants are planned or under construction around the world. 

I have been skeptical about ghg emission targets for many years. My thinking is that we need, first of all, to be clear about whether we are more concerned about climate change, or about the impacts of climate change on human, animal and plant life. We should then define exactly what we want to achieve and reward the people who help achieve it, whoever they are and however they do so. We should not assume that cutting back on ghg emissions is either necessary or sufficient to bring about the solution to whatever combination of depredations we deem to be the climate change problem. That is what these summits purport to do. They don't actually do it, as shown by the statisitics above. Nor do they do anything else. In the words of another, more prominent, summit skeptic, they are just so much blah, blah, blah. 

My suggestions for addressing climate change are conceptually quite simple:

• define the problem, and
• reward people for solving it.

Climate Stability Bonds use the market's incentives and efficiencies to channel our limited resources into where they will do most to solve the problem. Were they to be issued with the appropriate backing they would stimulate exploration of diverse, adaptive initiatives with the clear goal of solving the climate change problem as efficiently as possible.