Carrington Article

In his short article, Damian Carrington notes some significant barriers to climate change. All three of these are reasonable, but there are some important details that he leaves out.

First, he points out that the U.S. and China need to provide "outstanding leadership" when it comes to combating climate change. This scenario is extremely unlikely for many reasons. As we have frequently discussed, environmental issues have been politicized literally to death in the U.S. to the extent where very few productive measures can be taken. Just this weekend, the decision on whether the Keystone XL pipeline would be built from Canada through the U.S. was delayed until after the 2012 election. This is quite lucky for President Obama since he now does not have to make a decision that was sure to anger a significant number of people no matter what the decision was. It is also evidence that there are too many dissenting groups in the political arena that make easy policy decisions impossible.

This segues into my next point that another problem is that in the U.S., the environmental movement is too diffuse. There are too many interest and lobbying groups for small, individual causes that make it so that broad environmental change is nearly impossible. It would be more beneficial if there was a unified front for environmental change, but that is not the case.