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NASA’s James Hansen (a member of the planetary boundaries expert group) wrote in the introduction to his landmark 2008 paper “Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim?” (published with nine co-authors in the open-source journal Open Atmospheric Science Journal): “If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385ppm to at most 350ppm, but likely less than that.”52 Hansen and his colleagues reject a target of 450 ppm, for long the objective of both many governments and environmental groups. “A CO2 amount of order 450ppm or larger, if long maintained, would push Earth toward the ice-free state,” they maintain. And although the inertia of the climate system and slow response-times of ice sheets would limit the speed of this change, “such a CO2 level likely would cause the passing of climate tipping points and initiate dynamic responses that could be out of humanity’s control.”

TOWARD A TECHNOFIX?

Having said all that, solving climate change is actually a lot simpler than most people think. Global warming is not about overconsumption, morality, ideology, or capitalism. It is largely the result of human beings generating energy by burning hydrocarbons and coal. It is, in other words, a technical problem, and it is therefore amenable to a largely technical solution, albeit one driven by politics. I often receive emails telling me that fixing the climate will need a worldwide change in values, a program of mass education to reduce people’s desires to consume, a more equitable distribution of global wealth, “smashing the power” of transnational corporations, or even the abolition of capitalism itself. After having struggled with this for over a decade myself, I am now convinced that these viewpoints—which are subscribed to by perhaps a majority of environmentalists—are wrong. Instead, we can completely deal with climate change within the prevailing economic system. In fact, any other approach is likely doomed to failure.

Here are two options that certainly won’t work. First, we could try to reduce the global population. Certainly, fewer people by definition means lower emissions. But getting to 350 ppm by reducing the number of human carbon emitters on the planet is impossible as well as undesirable: At a first approximation it would require the number of people in the world to be reduced by four-fifths down to just a billion souls or less. Short of a program of mass forced sterilization and/or genocide, there is no way that this could be completed within the few decades necessary. Certainly there are a multitude of reasons why giving people access to family planning is a good idea, but climate change mitigation is not among them. The best reason for promoting birth control is that people want it, and everyone should be able to choose how many children they have. The future of the planet doesn’t come into it.

The second option is to restrain economic growth, as GDP is very closely tied to the consumption of energy and therefore carbon emissions. No one disputes that recessions do tend to reduce emissions: The global financial and economic crisis that began in 2008 led to a fall in CO2 emissions worldwide by 1.3 percent within a year.53 But imagine that the recession had been caused not by solvency problems within financial institutions but by government policies to tackle climate change. Jobless totals would be rising, government cutbacks in welfare services hitting the poor, and a new age of austerity dawning—all because of the tree huggers. If you thought the debate on climate change was ill-tempered now, imagine that particular future and its implications.

Greens have for years called into question GDP as a measure of true progress, but the reality is that increasing prosperity—measured in material consumption—is nonnegotiable both politically and socially, especially