We Can't Fix Climate Change; But We Can Create a System That Will
20 Pages Posted: 6 Jun 2024
Date Written: May 05, 2024
Abstract
I argue that solutions to climate change have stalled globally because (well meaning) climate advocates have largely taken a top-down approach to addressing the problem by betting on a few uncertain technologies. This approach is risky, and it expects ordinary people (especially in the fast-emerging economies) to make tremendous sacrifices in future wellbeing. I describe an alternative pro-market, bottom-up approach that is based not on guessing winning technologies but on robustly defining performance metrics for climate-reducing innovation. This consumer-led, corporate accounting solution, which I have been pursuing for three years now in my academic research and scholarly activism, has strong parallels to how the world, in the wake of the Great Crash of 1929, reimagined capital markets through the creation of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles in the 1930s.
Keywords: climate change, capitalism, carbon accounting, innovation, globalization
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