World waking up to cost of climate inaction
- By Ni Tao
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E-mail Shanghai Daily, March 28, 2016
As he explained: "if we fail on one, we will fail on the other; and we will fail if we try to do them separately."
The failure to manage climate change will likely create an environment so hostile that it will undermine the successes achieved in global development, reintroduce poverty and push us back in development, he argued.
For a long time human struggles against global warming have been replete with failures due to a popular tendency to delay adoption of necessary, and sometimes painful, measures.
This is typically the case in difficult and uncertain times, when people are wary of making radical changes. Besides, when consensus on meaningful collective action is elusive many will be tempted to take a wait-and-see stance.
In Stern's words, it might be tempting to wait for new technologies to solve our problems, or wait until we find somewhere to store carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere, but this would be "a very bad policy, because the later we leave it to act, the more difficult it becomes."
Decrying such heel-dragging in his latest book "Why Are We Waiting?", Stern said the advent of new technologies has driven down the costs of addressing global warming.
For instance, he lauded China's role as a major producer of solar panels as it effectively makes solar power an affordable alternative to fossil fuels.
He went on to say that policy makers ought to adopt the right economic incentives to guide climate-control efforts. A typical wrong policy he sees is offering explicit or implicit fossil fuel subsidies, which some governments are still doling out to businesses.
"If we emit greenhouse gases and pollution and it costs us nothing, then we are doing something that is very costly," Stern warned.
