The Climate Is Too-Big-to-Fail

How is it that we really do care about too-big-to-fail banks and largely embrace the sacrifice-laden efforts of governments to bail them out, but apparently don’t care enough about our too-big-to-fail climate system to accept personal and collective sacrifices needed to “bail it out”, i.e. to keep catastrophic climate change at bay? Well, this is a question psychologists and sociologists are better suited and trained to answer than I am. Instead, I would like to sacrifice a few minutes of my spare time in an attempt to sketch the consequences of the fact that our climatic system is too-big-to-fail in conjunction with the fact that we have not really cared to stop dangerously interfering with it so far.

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The Dilemma of a Do-Gooder

Readers and visitors may have noticed that my general view of humanity’s environmental, social and related problems is that no real solution can be achieved without widespread acceptance that we must change. We must change the way we are living, the way we are consuming, housing, travelling, communicating etc. Prolonging the status quo of attitudes, values and life styles will only provide half-baked solutions. However, I recently have been thinking about this (I still am) and I realized that the problem is even deeper than I had thought in the first place.

Is Geo-Engineering a Viable Solution to Climate Change?

In a few months the Rio +20 conference will be held. This means that 20 years have gone since world leaders agreed on an unprecedentedly ambitious programme for global sustainability – including the first attempt to lay foundation for a global fight against climate change. During these 20 years, much has changed – unfortunately, mainly to the worse. We still find ourselves on the business-as-usual emissions trajectory – in other words, on collision course. Understandingly, this feeds calls for alternative approaches and solutions. One of them that gains ever more prominence is: geo-engineering.

Some Words on Geo-Engineering

Unfortunately, these few but essential words on geo-engineering as a “solution” to the climate change problem referred to in the title of this post are not mine. Due to an acute lack of time and high temperatures (and thus intellectual shortages), I have to rely on others. Not as bad as it seems, though – the article on geo-engineering by Herman Daly is really worth reading (and, for that matter, the classic text by Bastiat he refers to, too). It is a very well compressed critique of the “engineers’ solutions” to climate change (without any offence against engineers in general), showing the main flaws of these approaches.