Climate change is an incredibly important and urgent problem, one that could potentially destroy civilization as we know it unless we quickly curb our emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs). For decades now, experts have been telling us that we need to make major changes to our lifestyles. At the same time, they have suggested that our governments need to agree to binding emissions cuts and, to achieve those cuts, need to implement market instruments like carbon taxes and tradable permits. These ideas are all good in the abstract. In the real world, however, they have gone nowhere and will continue to go nowhere. We should abandon them for now and approach the problem from a different angle. Instead of focusing on the immediate need to reduce emissions, we can view the core challenge as accelerating a set of societal and technical transitions that are already taking place. For that, we have a broad portfolio of policy instruments, most of which operate at the national scale and have already proved themselves to be effective. To solve climate change, we need to continue with these policy instruments, further enhancing their scope and geographic coverage.

That was it, the short synopsis of this book. The last ten chapters have provided the basis to support it. But those chapters have contained many different strands of ideas. In this final chapter, I pull them all together into a simple, clear storyline.

The big picture

The traditional story of climate change is that it is a natural and unintended consequence of modern industrial society operating in an unregulated state. To stop it, we need to enter into a more or less permanent state of intense regulation of one sort or another. This is what is required to keep our existing stocks of fossil fuels in the ground, rather than burning them to support additional consumption.