Random Variable

From a recent post:

The physicist told me not to worry at all–and not to worry about trying to be environmentally cautious. It’s already too late. Over a decade ago he worked with a Nobel prize winner who at that point said the situation was hopeless–and his estimates were more conservative than the optimistic ones today.

I don’t have any sources, so you’ll just have to take my blind assertion for it - but the “it’s too late” meme is one I’ve seen quite a lot in the run up to the publication of the IPCC AR4 Synthesis report. This is odd, because the synthesis report says nothing new - it is a summary of the 3000-odd pages that make up the three working group reports of “Climate Change 2007″. Also, claiming it’s too late already buys into the rhetoric of the denialists. Maybe we will see a change in strategy as the nobel-prize winning IPCC makes it harder and harder to deny basic physics.

…the only way to cope adequately with climate change is a collectivist, statist, approach that installs strict regulations on corporations, moves the US away from cars and oil, caps salaries and bonuses, and undertakes large scale planning.

I hope that means collectivist in only a Polanyiesque sense. That said, I have a strange feeling that we will enter a new age of capitalism (yet another realisation of its self-revolutionary potential) - one that has extremely low time discounts, i.e. “sustainable capitalism”.

Nevertheless, calling for caps on bonuses undermines the impact of ordinary consumers.

Now isn’t the time to give up.