This Australian climate advocate and professor (U. of Melbourne) is visiting in the US. Here he reports on the views of prominent US climate advocates.
Over the last few months I’ve had the privilege of listening to a range of leading climate change policy advocates in Australia, the US, Canada and Europe reflect on priority actions for reducing the risk of runaway climate change.
This has included interviews with many of the lead authors of the strategies reviewed in the Post Carbon Pathways report. In this Post Carbon Postcard #2, written from New York City, I’d like to highlight a few of their responses to two of the most common questions in the minds of people who have been working on climate change and environmental issues for many years: Is it too late? And...So what should we do now?Their responses are not at all encouraging to me. First of all, the consensus is that we now cannot escape the deleterious effects of climate change, we can only mitigate them. (By the way, I agree with this.) Second, the responses indicate to me that there are no new practical ideas about how to effect policies that can mitigate the effects. Some examples:
- Be prepared to write letters to your Congressman to lobby, to demonstrate, in front of a coal- fired power plant if necessary or in front of a utilities office.
- One priority would be eliminating subsidies to fossil fuels and shifting some of those subsidies to renewables, clean energy, technologies.... The only way to get rid of them is through passing a law....
