It has occurred to me that we are very unlucky in one respect. We are running out of fossil fuels, and eventually most people who are burning those fuels are going to stop doing that, because they are going to become scarce and expensive. Price rationing is going to push the consumption level down. The problem is, that will happen quite a bit after we’ve reached the point of extremely serious consequences from climate change. So doing nothing fixes the problem of fossil fuel use, but way too late. Doing something now is urgent, but without intervention by forces outside the market (cough, cough, government), we can’t make it happen now. Intervention could cause us to go from a regime where people are free to burn all the still-cheap fossil fuels they want to a regime where they aren’t free to do that, but quite a few people are apparently unwilling to make that change. Not to mention the political and financial clout applied to delaying any action by people with a sunk cost in the fossil fuel industry.
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