- principal author Benjamin Cook of NASA and his colleagues from Columbia and Cornell universities are saying that climate change will bring to the continent a “new normal” more brutally dry than even the multiple-decades-long droughts that caused the Native American societies of Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde to collapse. This, they add, is now expected to happen even if greenhouse gas emissions are significantly lowered in the decades to come. The impact of such droughts, they conclude, will exceed the bounds of anything known in the history of the continent or in its scientifically reconstructed pre-history.
- In other words, the California drought of recent years offers only a foretaste of what is to come. Incidentally, Cook, et al. are by no means outliers in the literature of climate prediction. Other important studies with similar forecasts support a steadily broadening consensus on the subject. |
Reading this, I found myself asking "so what do we do?" Ouch. Is there any optimistic solution out there?for much of the damage there will be no remedy
The author mentions California's cap-and-trade program, which following his logic, would imply that cap and trade will eventually be America's dominant way of pricing carbon. Do you think the cap and trade method would be better than an outright carbon tax? I've done some brief research into it and what I've come away with is that they both have pros and cons. However, everything I've read seems to indicate that we will never get a handle on GHG emissions within our current economic model until there is global consensus on carbon pricing forcing the markets to act; if I recall correctly, there is supposed to be some sort of pricing agreement/framework to come out of COP 21 in Paris this December, so I expect there will be more chatter about this in the future. I know Bernie Sanders has mentioned that he is much more strongly in favor of a carbon tax, saying that Wallstreet would make too much profit off of a cap and trade system; my gut has no qualms with that assertion, but logically I know the reality is more complex than that.
I really don't feel that I can comment intelligently. My assessment of the situation is that both carbon taxes and cap-and-trade are attempts to internalize the externalities of emissions so either is better than neither. This is not an intelligent assessment, however, and the product of a sketchy understanding of the realities on the ground at best. I know that market forces will act quicker when there is money to be made.
That's my impression as well. I think if the US and China (plus maybe Europe or Russia or a smattering of other large developed/developing economies) could come to a big enough agreement about carbon pricing, the smaller economies would get swept along with the global market. It will be interesting to see what comes out of COP 21 this year.