Writing at Bloomberg, Matthew Yglesias looks at efforts to reduce our production of greenhouse gases and do something about climate change. These efforts have mostly gone nowhere and he shows why. See his conclusion:
If you’re a climate hawk, it’s easy to be mad at politicians for their timidity in the face of an urgent crisis. But there’s also genuinely no point in asking ecologically minded elected officials to fall on their swords and lose elections over unpopular ideas, turning over control of the government to people whose ideas are much worse.
All of this leads to a difficult truth: The problem here lies not with the politicians, or even with the billionaires or oil companies. It lies with voters themselves, who recognize that climate change is a real problem but are not necessarily willing to sacrifice much of anything to tackle it.
Yglesias very nearly describes my attitude about it. As long as India and China with, between them, three-eighths of the world’s population refuse to do anything meaningful about curbing carbon emissions, why should we?
Like the national debt, climate change is a problem we kick down the road for future generations to solve or survive.
