Where the Billion$ from Durban Should Be Going Instead

In the Washington Post's article on the agreement in Durban, they write:

Last week, researchers from the Wilhelm Bjerknes Centre in Bergen, Norway, gave a presentation in Durban projecting that the Arctic will experience a 2-degree temperature increase within one to two decades. The only way to limit the global increase to 2 degrees, the researchers said, was to have global emissions peak by 2020 and fall between 40 percent and 50 percent between 2040 and 2050.

“That’s the real missing element here,” said Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “There’s nothing that’s going to get the world to lift its game and close that gap.”

It seems to me there is one way, and only one way, that global CO2 emissions will be 1/2 of 2020 levels by 2050: if there is a cheaper alternative than burning fossil fuels. That's it. People want to be warm and comfortable and fly to SoCal in the winter and overseas to climate change conferences, and the heck with those living a hundred years from now.

So instead of establishing bodies to collect and distribute tens of billions of dollars a year to poor countries -- which we should be doing anyway, not because the climate is changing but because they're, you know, poor -- we should take those 10s B/yr and make a massive R&D effort to find ways to generate cheaper energy. Take 1% of it and hire the world's best PR agencies so they'll make it like going to the moon or defeating the Nazis. Build a few CERN-scale laboratories around the world, give the world's smart nuclear engineers and fusion scientists and nanotechnologists healthy grants, and have a yearly conference (run by technical people, not the UN) that reports on their progress. Include energy efficiency experts too, of course, and other smart people with ideas worth pursuing like wave energy and tidal power and more solar. Cut them loose.


That's what's going to work, isn't it, not hammering on people to reduce emissions when it can only make relatively small changes at best, and having the rich pay for the impact of their profligate lifestyle on the poor. It didn't work 20 years ago and it didn't work now, because after China develops India is going to develop, and after that will come the rest of south Asia, and then (hopefully) Africa, and the population is going to keep increasing in all of them. You can't stop people from wanting to live better. So you have to provide a less impactful way for them to do that.