I agree that the solution to climate change is high prices for fossil fuels. The problem with the free market solution is that no one emitter internalizes the global costs of one ton's worth of carbon emissions. If we could sue each emitter for all the damage done (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase_theorem - yes you are probably tired of me citing the Coase Theorem over and over again but it is a fundamental idea of modern economics) then the price would reflect its scarcity plus a premium for all the damage it does.
However, the costs associated with that transaction are too high and as a result the price of fossil fuels will always be "too low," in the sense that the private cost of burning fossil fuels will always be lower than the social cost.
You may have noticed that recently when gasoline prices were very high, a number of alternate sources of fossil fuel appeared. Also, people started buying fuel efficient cars - Priuses and Volts and so on suddenly became very popular. The political opposition to alternate fuels like corn-based or cellose-based ethanol start to go down as well - that's why we have the Renewable Fuels Standard now (which EPA completely eviscerated unfortunately so it has no binding effect except to force us to use corn-based ethanol, which has the same carbon emissions as gasoline and is basically a subsidy to corn and soybean producers, grrrrr don't get me started).
The solution to climate change is for the cost of fossil fuels to go up enough that we have an incentive to develop the alternatives that are just a little bit out of reach, commercially, because fossil fuels are so much cheaper (coal in particular is preposterously cheap in the U.S. given the damage it does to the environment, although we've developed some technologies over the past few decades that help a lot). But those prices will always be lower than they should be because of the gap between the private and social cost of consuming fossil fuels. The answer is to impose either a cap and trade system (which puts a cap on the amount of emissions we are allowed to produce and allows the price to vary enough to meet that cap) or a carbon tax (which provides more certainty about the premium alternative fuel sources will earn).
The problem is it's impossible to enforce a cap and trade system internationally, so the only thing that would really work is to ask everybody to impose a carbon tax. But if everybody imposes a carbon tax the developing countries don't get a handout, so no one is even considering a carbon tax in the current talks, I would wager. That plus we only have a vague idea of what the emissions cap/carbon tax should be, and given the billions of dollars at stake it would be better to have a more precise idea, which we probably can't get without another 30 years or so worth of data.
I don't know if climate change is going to be catastrophic. It's going to impact some countries more than others - the United States will be more or less fine - we're wealthy enough to withstand more extreme weather events and our agricultural production will probably actually increase, unless the ecosystem collapses for some strange reason (see colony collapse disorder -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_collapse_disorder). But other countries like Indonesia with lots of shanty towns that will just get decimated by violent weather, are extremely dependent on subsistence agriculture that will likely be severely impacted, are going to suffer a lot more than we will. It might not be the end of the world but it will be pretty bad and it is mostly our fault (in the sense that the United States is the Saudi Arabia of coal and we've emitted more carbon than anybody else over the last century).
Yes, the temperature change up until now has been very small, barely statistically detectable. The issue is what happens when that temperature change becomes more significant, which our scientific community says is pretty likely.
I did a back of the envelope calculation once of how much it would cost us to restrict our emissions using current technologies to the targets Obama set and it came out to about $150 billion a year, so it would cost us 1% of GDP *annually*. That's an enormous, enormous cost. The hope is that, in response to this cost, the private sector will come up with some alternatives to lower the impact on us. But I admit we would be making some pretty big sacrifices, although as I mentioned earlier we are already imposing the emissions restrictions because of the Supreme Court's decision that carbon emissions must be treated as a criteria pollutant (
http://www3.epa.gov/airquality/urbanair/ - "EPA calls these pollutants "criteria" air pollutants because it regulates them by developing human health-based and/or environmentally-based criteria (science-based guidelines) for setting permissible levels."). So the CAFE fuel economy standards and the coal-fired power generation standards are already set at levels intended to reduce carbon emission levels based on the targets set by the Administration (which were in turn partially informed by an interagency panel of "scientists," although there was a lot of political pressure brought to bear).
I mean yeah. I was on the interagency panel calculating the "social cost of carbon" for purposes of cost benefit analysis of rules that would reduce carbon emissions and it was political. But the politics was mostly in how to present and interpret the scientific findings. It was kind of like a peer review, except one of the peer reviewers was Congress that put a political prism on how we needed to present things.
I've been taught all my life to value service to the weak and powerless.
