FIXING THE CLIMATE

A blending of top-down and bottom-up approaches to climate change.

When the world is burning, is there time to change fire engines? Perhaps, write professors Sabel and Victor. The outlook may seem bleak, but new models of cooperation and “effective problem-solving” have been emerging in recent years. Some of these involve government, federal or state (as with California’s aggressive efforts to reduce carbon emissions); some are at the corporate level, generally driven by self-interest and the possibility that new methods of atmospheric decarbonization will yield new profit centers. Among the most effective measures, the authors suggest, are those that leverage local governance and involve the citizens who live on the ground in places where smokestacks are belching emissions or drag chains are deforesting the tropics. The authors deem this blend “experimentalist governance,” adding that changes and innovations will best come from several directions while requiring some sort of coordination. In a meaningful example, they suggest that battling overgrazing on the part of sheep would demand not only agreements on limits set by the shepherds themselves, but also on the possibility of breeding sheep that eat less grass or engineering new kinds of grass as well. This speaks to the authors’ assertion that battling climate change through, say, pollution reduction depends on “destabilizing innovation,” the kind of creative destruction that turned the world from landlines to cellphones. In sometimes-arid prose, the authors examine numerous case studies, including Brazil’s tangled efforts to preserve the Amazonian rainforest even as its developing economy considers it to be “unspoiled land to settle and exploit.” Throughout, they suggest that local people and “small groups of willing innovators” must pitch in to help further “open plurilateral agreements” at the national and international levels.

Of considerable, if specialized, interest to climate activists and policymakers.