Good article. I've long felt that people who accept climate change are surprisingly complacent about it.<p>I suspect the nature of the problem is poorly understood. A lot of the focus in north america is on personally reducing. This feels similar to not littering, not spraying pesticides on your lawn, in other words not polluting <i>locally</i>.<p>But CO2 isn't a local problem. It's global. Reducing use in one spot or making use in a given case doesn't necessarily work. There's always a use for more energy globally, so someone else with a lower standard of living will justifiably want to take up what you don't use. Meanwhile, if a process is made more efficient, this frees up energy to be used elsewhere in the system. Jevon's paradox plays a role here too.<p>Global emissions are up, not down. Greatly up. Everything we've done so far has accomplished precisely nothing on the global warming front. We are richer, more people are out of poverty. Because we optimized for that, and not for lower co2 production, globally.<p>The central issue is that co2 is cheaper than alternatives, in at least enough cases that it's still widely used. Solar etc are dropping in cost, but not so much that they've cut carbon.<p>A carbon tax would raise the price of co2 and encourage use of alternatives. This could be combined either with an international agreement in other countries to tax carbon, or a system of tariffs on countries that don't.<p>The system wouldn't be perfect, but it would actually stand a chance of having us <i>switch</i> to non carbon methods.