We’re talking about leadership…
John Llewellyn, Senior Economic Policy Adviser for Lehman Brothers, makes the case for economic incentives. Exhortation, he says, won’t work.
If he’s right (and accepting that unchecked climate change will be disastrous), then I think it’s fair to say that the world is stuffed.
Because something has to come before incentives – the decision by a hundred or so leaders to apply those incentives, and the decision by a few billion voters to support their government’s actions.
That will require an awful lot of exhortation. And it’s also where we’re flying blind.
We spend huge sums of money in trying to understand the global climate system – but hardly anything on grasping the decision-making environment.
Take a small example of our ignorance – the role of Al Gore in the climate change debate.
It’s conventional wisdom that Gore has played a substantial and positive role pushing the world – and especially those parts of the world that speak with an American accent – towards accepting that some kind of deal on climate change is inevitable.
But what of the unintended consequences of his involvement?
We’ve taken one side of the most divisive election in recent US history and irrevocably associated him with one of the most divisive issues in US politics.
Sure – there are many people he has found easy to convince. But there are many others who have been pushed into ever more fervent opposition (some of them run blogs with names like Planet Gore).
Does this matter? Well, it depends on how large and influential the diehard lobby is. Perhaps they’ll be a negligible force, as George Bush fades into obscurity. Or perhaps, they’ll be convinced if we shout more loudly at them. But maybe they’ll end up holding a blocking vote.
The point is that we don’t know. The climate lobby doesn’t have much data on how different groups are likely to react as the climate change debate develops. It doesn’t have a theory of who it needs to influence and how.
And it hasn’t modelled the complex and unstable process by which 6 billion people and a hundred plus nation states come to a decision.
A big omission, if you ask me.
