Kevin Drum has been writing a bit lately on his take on why we are so inactive in the face of the climate threat:
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/08/why-climate-change-is-so-hard/
What makes climate change different from other environmental calamities isn’t that it’s bigger or farther away or difficult to see. Those things all contribute to our inaction, but the key difference is that halting climate change requires us to dramatically alter our way of life . All of us. For a very long time.
Human beings aren’t wired to do this. You aren’t doing it. I’m not doing it. Europeans aren’t doing it. No one is doing it. We’re willing to make modest changes here and there, but dramatic changes? The kind that seriously bite into our incomes and our way of life? Nope.
When I mention this to people, a common reaction is disbelief. You really think people will let the planet burn before they’ll give up their cars? That’s exactly what I think, because it’s happened many times before. Over and over, human civilizations have destroyed their environments because no one was willing to give up their piece of it. They knew exactly what they were doing but still couldn’t stop. They have overfished, overgrazed, overhunted, overmined, and overpolluted. They have literally destroyed their own lifeblood rather than make even modest changes to their lifestyles.
Given this background, he figures any plan that requires large sacrifices from people just isn’t going to fly politically. Even people who say they are concerned won’t do enough.
So the central feature he favours for climate action is really gigantic investments in R&D (like a few trillion over the next ten years) to try to accelerate cleaner energy tech and capture/sequestration options. Theory being that people aren’t willing to change their lifestyles but they are willing to throw a few more trillion on the debt pile. Also any improvement on the tech side helps the problem around the world and not just in the country where it is invented.
I think he also favours big clean-energy subsidies, but I’m not sure on that. It would seem to fit into the “spend money like water, but don’t ask for lifestyle sacrifices” model, and would also help accelerate clean energy. And we desperately need to be building all that stuff.
Overall I am thinking that the message on climate could stand to be less “You must change your lifestyle to save the planet” and more “We need to spend massive amounts of other people’s money in order to protect your lifestyle from the climate threat”.
