We will need to fight against market fundamentalism and help our politicians remember that they exist to serve not only the economy, but the people of a country as well.
“As we have seen, cutting carbon with carbon pricing or regulation is not politically painless, so the main efforts from citizens should be directed at the political process by encouraging what Jaccard calls “climate-sincere” politicians. Since making real economic changes is politically difficult, politicians prefer ineffective window-dressing that does little except making voters think they are taking action.
“These might include funding for electric vehicle rechargers, a tax-break for wind power, training for electric car technicians, grants for biofuel producers, climate research, adaptation planning, an educational kit for schools … subsidies for home insulation … funding for urban transit feasibility studies…” writes Jaccard in a much longer list.
He calls such spending political sleight-of-hand to avoid real action and that merely demonstrates the politicians are not sincere at all. While Jaccard himself drives an electric car and heats his home with an electric heat pump, he says the most important place for concerned citizen to invest in stopping climate change is political action.
The trouble is changing your own personal behaviour by say, selling your car or refusing to fly, may make you feel like you are doing something useful, but the effect is tiny when all your neighbours drive SUVs and air travel continues to soar.
In fact, rather than trying to assuage your guilt at flying or driving by buying carbon offsets as many are now doing, Jaccard recommends taking the money and donating it 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.”
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.”
Let’s hope we can get most politicians on board before it is too late.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
6 comments
January 2, 2020 at 7:01 am
tildeb
Because over 80% of carbon emissions comes from the kind of energy that burns that all of us use (in a thousand of different ways every day.. like walking on a cement sidewalk or pushing plastic buttons on a keyboard or swiping our fingers across a screen), addressing the problem of climate change cannot be addressed effectively by remaking one’s personal behaviour. If everybody in the world stopped driving, flying, eating meat, and so on, nothing would change: the dripping of too much CO2 into a saturated atmosphere would continue unabated at a slightly decreased rate. Whoopty do. This is the point way too many people simply don’t grasp yet is the underlying principle upon which government intervention to price carbon accurately to reflect its devastating real world cost depends. Government regulation is the ONLY solution that can achieve meaningful change.
So the next time someone tries to present personal change as the ‘moral’ and/or ‘ethical’ requirement to support something like a carbon tax, you know you’re addressing someone who has already been fooled. We need fewer fools, especially those in office who require much greater political capital from all of us to begin to address climate change in any meaningful way.
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January 2, 2020 at 8:38 am
tildeb
Ha! I thought I clicked on Bob’s avatar but inserted my own ‘like’ by mistake!
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January 2, 2020 at 8:41 am
Bob Browning
The clout of the capitalists is too vast to overcome by growing the numbers of well meaning legislators- they learn quickly in the “play our way or disappear” political circles and make meaningless “compromises”. We will need to occupy the institutions and halt their functioning to get the immediate necessary changes.
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January 2, 2020 at 3:19 pm
Carmen
Hi all, I’m in Australia (state of Victoria) where many fires are burning out of control. We’ve had to change our travel plans to NSW because it would have required driving on the Princes Highway, which (it is now being reported) will be closed for weeks. Where we are – out on the Mornington Peninsula – it seems a safe enough place to be, although there are fires burning about 300 km away. Many Australians are waking up to the reality of global warming, believe me – it’s as ‘in your face’ as it can get! I will be happy to go home at the end of February and hope the fires don’t get any closer. Temps are going up above 40 tomorrow so that certainly isn’t promising. . Not much rain this time of year, either.
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January 2, 2020 at 9:02 pm
tildeb
You may find this enlightening as to why Australia and why now and why so many wildfires.
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January 2, 2020 at 9:09 pm
tildeb
All legislators need to do is accept the science. All people need to do is convince them that their careers (and businesses) depend on following the science.
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