Photo

As world leaders assemble in Paris for the Monday launch of the 21st round of negotiations aimed at improving on the ineffective 1992 climate change treaty, I’ve assembled some worthwhile reading on the risks attending human-driven climate change and a host of prescriptions worth considering. None will be easy to achieve.

As for the risks, Justin Gillis has a helpful set of basic climate change questions and answers. (You can ask more questions here.) Curt Stager, a paleoclimatologist and author (who wrote on Dot Earth about sea level forecasts for the year 2300), tries to clarify that the most profound consequences are measured in millenniums, not treaty meetings:

Photo

In this new Anthropocene epoch, the “Age of Humans,” we have become so numerous, our technology so powerful, and our lives so interconnected that we are now a force of nature on a geological scale. By running our civilization on fossil fuels, we are both creating and destroying climates that our descendants will live in tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of years from now. [Read the rest of the Op-Ed here.]

Contrast what Stager writes with the tiny 2020-2030 window in which all of the Paris “intended” emissions pledges play out. Do you see an emissions gap? Gillis has more on this angle here: “ Paris Climate Talks Avoid Scientists’ Idea of ‘Carbon Budget’.”

Photo

On solutions, Charles Komanoff of the Carbon Tax Center has rounded up 32 signatories, including four economics Nobelists and three former cabinet secretaries — George Shultz, Robert Reich and Steven Chu — for a letter to Paris climate negotiators pressing the case for taxing carbon dioxide emissions. The text is below, along with a link to the letter as a pdf.

Peter Thiel, a Web and energy technology investor, wrote “The New Atomic Age We Need,” an Op-Ed article on Friday centering on this core thought:

The single most important action we can take is thawing a nuclear energy policy that keeps our technology frozen in time. If we are serious about replacing fossil fuels, we are going to need nuclear power, so the choice is stark: We can keep on merely talking about a carbon-free world, or we can go ahead and create one.

To be sure you don’t get the idea that only investors in nuclear technology are for this, please click back to an important “Open Letter to Environmentalists on Nuclear Energy” signed by 75 notable conservation biologists and posted just over a year ago by Barry Brook, chairman of environmental sustainability at the University of Tasmania and co-author of a paper in Conservation Biology that was the focus of the letter:

As conservation scientists concerned with global depletion of biodiversity and the degradation of the human life-support system this entails, we, the co-signed, support the broad conclusions drawn in the article “ Key role for nuclear energy in global biodiversity conservation” published in Conservation Biology (Brook & Bradshaw 2014). Brook and Bradshaw argue that the full gamut of electricity-generation sources—including nuclear power—must be deployed to replace the burning of fossil fuels, if we are to have any chance of mitigating severe climate change.

Then there’s frontier research. On Friday, in case you missed it, details were leaked about Bill Gates’s planned Monday announcement of a global public-private research fund for clean-energy sciences and technology development.

Photo

Here’s the text of the letter from the Carbon Tax Center (the full document, with background on the signers, is here):

A Call to Paris Climate Negotiators: Tax Carbon Taxing carbon pollution will spur everyone ― businesses, consumers and policymakers ― to reduce climate-damaging emissions, invest in efficient energy systems and develop low-carbon energy sources.

This single policy change — explicitly using prices within existing markets to shift investment and behavior across all sectors — offers greater potential to combat global warming than any other policy, with minimal regulatory and enforcement costs. We urge negotiators at the upcoming U.N. Climate Conference in Paris to pursue widespread implementation of national taxes on climate-damaging emissions. We endorse these four principles for taxing carbon to fight climate change without undermining economic prosperity: 1.Carbon emissions should be taxed across fossil fuels in proportion to carbon content, with the tax imposed “upstream” in the distribution chain. 2.Carbon taxes should start low so individuals and institutions have time to adjust, but then rise substantially and briskly on a pre-set trajectory that imparts stable expectations to investors, consumers and governments. 3.Some carbon tax revenue should be used to offset unfair burdens to lower-income households. 4.Subsidies that reward extraction and use of carbon-intensive energy sources should be eliminated. Signed, Frank Ackerman

Kenneth J. Arrow

Jim Barrett

Alan S. Blinder

Dallas Burtraw

Steven Chu

Richard N. Cooper

Robert H. Frank

Shi-Ling Hsu

Charles Komanoff

N. Gregory Mankiw

Donald B. Marron Jr.

Aparna Mathur

Warwick McKibbin

Gilbert Metcalf

Adele C. Morris

Robert Reich

John Reilly

Mark Reynolds

Alice M. Rivlin

James Rydge

Thomas C. Schelling

Robert J. Shapiro

George P. Shultz

Joseph Stiglitz

Steven Stoft

Chad Stone

Jerry Taylor

Richard Thaler

Eric Toder

Martin Weitzman

Gary Yohe

And Please don’t forget to check out Brian McFadden’s cartoon, “President Obama’s Modest Climate Change Goals.” Here are the three concluding panels:

Photo

To learn more about what President Obama actually has in mind, read the transcript of the most recent press call with senior staff going over the White House’s Paris game plan. I asked the first question, on whether the president might return at the end if things go well (the answer was no) and the limited focus on energy research and development.

As a coda, I have to add this Twitter note from Nick Sousanis about “The Fragile Framework,” his innovative collaboration with Nature’s news features editor, Richard Monastersky — a comic book telling of the 25-year history of climate change diplomacy and rising carbon dioxide emissions: