How to make decarbonizing sexy?

[andygates]

In discussion today, "why does everyone have to agree before cutting emissions? Why not just do it?"

As I see it, this is because they all view "it" as a painful thing, and so the whole Prisoner's Dilemma / competition thing kicks in. Untrustworthy actors are expected to welch; trustworthy actors don't want to be the schmuck.

The whole thing would be a metric ton easier if someone had the chutzpah to present decarbonizing as a short term economic and social good.

Any suggestions? despaer , economics is your bag. How'd you sell it? The current best sell, the Stern report, is about a 500% ROI but on a century timescale, which clearly means not you, not me and not the current governments (possibly not the current nations).

Comments

[simoneck.livejournal.com]

Hummm, and how do you control whether people breed or not?
I can't see any government trying to get that one through in a democracy.

[andygates.livejournal.com]

Well, that might be an argument against democracy, but that's tricky to get support for!

Prosperity governs breeding rates. The more prosperous, healthy and long-lived people are, the less they breed. So to control population, just make everything wonderful and folks will slow down their breeding automagically (well, in a generation or two).

So: How do we make everything wonderful?