Why we can't just pay for some carbon credits

I'm concerned with the reductionist, narrow thinking that leads us to believe that we can actually solve the problems that we are now facing. We have delayed too long, and the problems are now something to adapt to rather than to solve, as JM Greer suggests. My comments below were originally addressed to Charles Wohlforth after he gave a lecture to the Complex Systems Group at UAA on climate change. Cindee said to post them, so I have.

Einstein said that problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them, thus inferring that one needs to think at a larger scale to solve problems. I listened to your talk yesterday and wondered what solutions could come out of a focus on climate change? Carbon credits? Tax credits for hybrids? The former is just a way for corporations to make money off of green initiatives, and a way to give lip service to green behaviors, for a problem that is long-term and secondary (sink pollution) to the real problem. The latter is just a way to churn more corporate profits while allowing business as usual (BAU) to continue. Arguably the embodied energy and use of rare metals in electric (or hybrid) cars, in addition to the costs to run them in terms of using more even higher quality (costly) batteries and/or electricity which is mostly derived from other non-renewable fuels (coal and recently natural gas) is another chimera.

So what is the bigger scale problem that Wohlforth failed to mention in his discussion? His graph plotting the correlation of GDP with CO2 emissions was accurate, but again fails to take a long enough time perspective at the larger scale. What causes CO2 emissions? A better graph would encompass the era of the entire industrial revolution with its population growth plotted against growth in the use of fossil fuels. The real issue is a population in massive overshoot due to 200 years of copious surplus energy in the form of non-renewable fuels.

Given the issue of peak oil, climate change models are probably not even accurate. Meteorologists are notoriously uneducated regarding peak oil, and fail to incorporate a plateau and fall in fossil fuels production starting in about 2005. Climate models extrapolate increasing oil production, while even the EIA is currently (and finally) predicting something different.

Peak oil is going to impact us much faster than climate change, and is a bigger, more imminent threat, as witnessed in the violent responses recently in Egypt. I do not believe that it is a coincidence that Egypt stopped exporting oil last year for the first time, and is now vulnerable through the need to import oil. Energy flows through all of our systems and is essential to our complex society--the take home being that physics tells us that a society with less oil will be less complex. How that loss in complexity plays out is the problem that we need to be addressing now through science.

If you think that the converging crises that we are facing can be addressed by global warming policies, then you're just not thinking on a grand enough scale regarding our problems.