Welcome to 2016 - It's Time to Start Cleaning up our Mess (Originally published on Linked-in on 1 January 2016)

Not Quite The Best Solution, But Moving in The Right Direction


Humanity has, in effect, been defecating in our own back yard for the last couple of hundred years. We appear to be starting to understand this is not very smart. The process for changing this is actually very simple; all of our faeces must be cleaned up (in real time), otherwise the endpoint is an uninhabitable planet. The mechanism is very simple: the cost of cleaning up must be included in the cost of the product causing the mess.


Economists and therefore policy makers and politicians continue to avoid the most significant issue, which is the cost of pollution. Because this cost is considered difficult to quantify, it's simply avoided or put more bluntly, ignored. The vast majority of current economics dealing with the use of energy are fundamentally flawed because they ignore the cost of pollution thereby allowing hugely polluting fossil fuels to be "economic".


They are not.


It would appear that a global consensus has been formed as a result of the 2015 Paris agreement. In a nutshell, you could summarize it along the lines that most countries now understand we cannot continue burning fossil fuels as we did in the past and do now.


This is significant.


Even though coal is "relatively cheap", the global coal age is starting to close and I sense the global oil age will also start to close in a few decades. The global gas age will likely continue into the second half of this century.


It doesn't have to be this way. Fossil fuels could continue to be used so long as the pollution generated was removed. The technology for pollution remediation exists but of course it hasn't been scaled-up to allow large scale remediation; consequently in the first instance, it'll be very expensive. This reflects the true cost of burning fossil fuels. In the ideal World, Economists would have recognised this hugely significant cost and factored it into energy policy and we wouldn't be where we are today. Hindsight is wonderful.


Sadly Economics still largely ignores this issue and comes up with ineffective & costly schemes, for example subsidising solar power at medium latitudes, which is completely illogical, or you might be harsher and say, plainly stupid!


What's needed is widespread recognition that we have to actively remediate human produced pollution and that the cost of all energy sources must include the cost of remediation. Put in different words, Economists (and therefore policy makers & politicians) cannot avoid massive costs such as pollution.


Economics is, in fact, a holistic, global "science" where any human process (cost), that changes the planet, must be remediated.


No Batchelor's, Master's or Doctorate is required to understand this; however, getting all the human tribes to buy in and implement this, is the ultimate change management project.


I think we have started on this road; however, to speed up the process requires traction within Economics as well as within the general public. Going forward we need to remove human-generated pollutants, almost certainly in a mechanical sense.


Spread the Word...