Surprisingly, it’s not a tax, as written by Mayer Hillman at the UK Guardian
There are three options in tackling climate change. Only one will work
The world faces a near-impossible decision – one that is already determining the character and quality of the lives of the generations succeeding us.
It is clear from the latest IPCC climate report that the first and only effective course, albeit a deeply unpopular one, would be to stop using any fossil fuels. The second would be to voluntarily minimise their use as much as climate scientists have calculated would deliver some prospect of success. Finally, we can carry on as we are by aiming to meet the growth in demand for activities dependent on fossil fuels, allowing market forces to mitigate the problems that such a course of action generates – and leave it to the next generation to set in train realistic solutions (if that is possible), that the present one has been unable to find.
These are the choices. There are no others. Future generations will judge us on what we choose to do in full knowledge – accessories before the fact – of the devastating consequences of continuing with our energy-profligate lifestyles.
What a legacy we are bequeathing – regions of the world becoming uninhabitable at an accelerating rate, creating potentially millions of ecological refugees; a burgeoning world population, diminishing reserves of finite and other resources, shortages of water and food, calamitous loss of genetic variability, and wars of survival.
Remarkably, public expectations about the future indicate that only minor changes in the carbon-based aspects of our lifestyles are anticipated. It is as if people can continue to believe that they have an inalienable right to travel as far and as frequently as they can afford. Indeed, there is a widespread refusal by politicians to admit to the fact the process of melting ice caps contributing to sea level rises, and permafrost thawing in tundra regions cannot now be stopped, let alone reversed. The longer we procrastinate, the greater the certainty of environmental degradation, social upheaval and economic chaos.
One has to wonder if Mr. Hillman will be taking a fossil fueled trip to the UN IPCC COP24 in Katowice, Poland. I wonder if he went to the pre-COP24 in Krakow, Poland, in October. Will he rail at all the attendees who took long fossil fueled trips to the conferences?
One also has to wonder when all Believers will give up their own use of fossil fuels. They’re so enthused to deny the use of reliable, inexpensive, easily obtained energy to people in 3rd world nations, which could bring them out of poverty, but, they don’t do the same in their own lives.
