PANEL: National Targets, Global Challenge: Climate Change, Copenhagen, and Beyond
Master of Ceremonies:
Josh Margolis, Co-Chief Executive officer, Cantor CO2e
Panelists:
Dr. Thomas Malone, Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Management, MIT Sloan School of Management
Robert Laubacher, Research Associate, MIT Sloan School of Management
Aart de Geus, Deputy Secretary General of the OECD
Changhua Wu, Greater China Director, The Climate Group
Dr. Lisa Randall, Professor of Physics, Harvard University
Dr. Gerd Leipold, Executive Director, Greenpeace International
Dr. Renate Christ, Secretary, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
Dr. Doug Arent, Director, National Renewable Energy Laboratory Center for Strategic Energy Analysis
Dr. John Felmy, Chief Economist, American Petroleum Institute
Panel summary by Max Currier, World Policy Journal
Jeff Felmy began with an impassioned plea: “The first thing we need to do is agree on the facts and then we can talk about policy.” Much of the subsequent discussion focused on diagnosing the problem of climate change from different perspectives without touching much on substantive policy prescriptions, although Aart de Geus did urge governments to levy taxes on emissions to encourage business growth in the “right direction,” and for governments to coordinate their actions “as collectively as possible.”
“We’re dealing with a massive market failure,” Changhua Wu said. Robert Laubacher added another failure, that of the mainstream media in “presenting complexity.” He lamented that the attendant issues (science, geopolitics, law) of climate change are “extraordinarily complex issues” which are “not easily understandable for the lay person.”
The panel spent considerable time discussing why too few people support the dramatic changes that are required to substantially reduce carbon emissions. Several panelists debated whether government officials had presented statistical and scientific information appropriately or whether an alarmist and dramatic arguments had left people feeling hopeless and helpless.
Several panelists believed that most people still were not persuaded that climate change poses a direct threat to their way of life, at least not in the immediate future. Dr. Tom Malone suggested that if we could better identify with future generations who will be far more affected by climate change than we are, then we might be compelled to make more responsible decisions.
Dr. Tom Malone recited a recent quote from Jeffrey Sachs: “We should be viewing this as global problem-solving rather than global negotiations.” A handful diplomats convening to discuss climate change at various meetings for relatively brief intervals is “slow bandwidth,” said Dr. Malone. He described his work on MIT’s Climate Collaboratorium as one mechanism to accelerate the process by employing collective intelligence toward finding workable solutions for reducing carbon emissions.
Josh Margolis concluded the discussion by noting that popular polling supports action to decrease carbon emissions, support that should be constructively employed. But, he cautioned, wishing won’t do the trick: “A vision without resources is nothing more than a hallucination.”