Don Pittis of CBC News reports that Mark Jaccard, energy economist and adviser to world leaders, known in global climate circles as a leading architect of British Columbia's successful climate struggle, wants to tell the world there is hope.
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| Two effective political actions |
He admits that in fossil fuel-producing areas of the world like Australia and Alberta, there are many who will remain impossible to sway.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."1
While business can perform a valuable role, with fossil fuels so cheap and easy to use, the economic pressure to act must come from government regulation. Without government rules, the free market would simply continue to use the atmosphere as a free garbage dump for carbon.
That's why the first step of Jaccard's strategy is to put the immediate effort on two areas that mostly affect a country's domestic markets.
Those two areas, energy production and transport — essentially power plants and cars and trucks — are responsible for the majority of most countries' greenhouse gas emissions. At the same time, that transition will lay foundations that will make later industrial decarbonization easier.
Jaccard recommends… donating… to a pro-climate group that can identify and support climate-sincere politicians and point a finger at the majority of those who are "faking it."
1 (2019, December 30). What you can do in 2020 to keep the world from ... - CBC.ca. Retrieved December 30, 2019, from https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/climate-change-failure-1.5400663
Because in the long run, getting carbon out of world's atmosphere cannot be completed by a few individuals doing good, it must instead be a project of people using politics to transform regional and national rules about carbon. Jaccard says those regions and countries will then combine to put carbon tariffs on the world's free riders, not a project for 2020.1
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