Follow the Carbon Leader

Did you hear that one about the Jesus cult drinking the kool-aid?  Or those little Scandinavian hamsters that launch themselves off cliffs en masse?  Psychologists aptly describe the social phenomenon of, well, stupid collective decisions, as “the Principle of Social Proof”.  PSP basically asserts that, in the absence of certainty, we look to others for correct behavior – this is especially relevant in groups.  So in the case of the lemming, every little rodent assumes their neighbor knows what’s going on, until… Splat!  It seems silly, but humans, and even environmentalists (who are categorically different than humans, clearly), are guilty of the same mind-numbing behavior.

Take carbon cap-and-trade and outright carbon regulations, for instance.  Nearly every environmental group and their mother has endorsed these two policy prescriptions for global warming, even though:
a.)    Cap-and-trade passes a politically unfeasible amount of increased energy cost to consumers
b.)    The highest politically feasible emissions reduction via cap-and-trade won’t actually solve climate change, or even come close
c.)    There’s very strong evidence to suggest that regulatory targets won’t be met… think Kyoto

Why is everyone on the carbon-cap-n-trade regulatory bandwagon when the idea so clearly… sucks?  I call it a bad case of lemming-brain, or PSP.

There is a strong tendency for us to follow the lead of our most renowned and respected experts on scientific, economic, and public policy.  Often unquestioningly, we take their advice for granted, maybe all too similarly to our sisters and brothers over in the Heaven’s Gate cult.  And where exactly are our experts getting their precedent for climate change policy?  From what I can tell, it’s the Montreal Protocol, which banned CFC’s in 1989, and air pollution cap and trade policies of the 1970’s.  At first glance, Montreal is a parallel example to global warming: one single pollutant concentrated in a single source industry with a cheap and easy replacement and comprehensive global consensus on enforcement…

Oh wait.  CFC’s are literally nothing like green house gas emissions, yet we’re operating as if they’re in the same paradigm.  Same thing with cap and trade for sulfur dioxide – the policy was created for a single industry (coal) with a relatively easy solution (smokestack scrubbers) that were quickly retrofitted and the problem of acid rain was solved.  Unless I’m unaware of some magical emissions-capturing device that can be retrofitted on every tail pipe, smokestack, cow butt, wildfire, and landfill leaching point, we’re not really technologically nor politically in quite the same place with climate change as we were with the ozone hole and acid rain problem.

So why are we using these two examples to craft our climate change policy when their situations are utterly un-analogous?  CAUSE EVERYONE JUMPED ON THE SAME CLIMATE BANDWAGON!  Wake up lemmings, wake up!  Let’s treat climate change like the globally complex problem it is by calling for globally powerful solutions – i.e., a huge investment in renewable energy combined with carbon regulation that will drop the price of clean energy below that of fossil, making our climate change solution not only economically feasible, but economically powerful.  As the leaders of the youth climate change movement, we don’t have to remain stuck in the same cap-and-trade black hole that the older generation has fallen into.  And as the more evolved mammal species, this is our opportunity to prove that, at least on climate issues, we’re just a bit smarter than lemmings.