Joe Romm warns of fast moving climate conversation

Almost everything you know about climate change solutions is outdated, for several reasons.

First, climate science and climate politics have been moving unexpectedly quickly toward a broad consensus that we need to keep total human-caused global warming as far as possible below 2°C (3.6°F) — and ideally to no more than 1.5°C. This has truly revolutionary implications for climate solutions policy.

Second, key climate solutions — renewables, efficiency, electric cars, and storage — have been advancing considerably faster than anyone expected, much faster than the academic literature anticipated. The synergistic effect of all these light-speed changes is only now beginning to become clear (see, for instance, my recent post, “Why The Renewables Revolution Is Now Unstoppable”.

Third, the media and commentariat have simply not kept up with all these changes and their utterly game-changing implications. As a result we end up with recent articles in such prestige publications as Foreign Affairs and the New York Times that are literally out-of-date the instant they are published, as I’ll discuss below.

Read what Joe Romm has written on ClimateProgress - “Almost Everything You Know About Climate Change Solutions Is Outdated, Part 1.”

(Clive Hamilton, an Australian author and public intellectual and since 2008 the Professor of Public Ethics at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, a joint centre of Charles Sturt University and the University of Melbourne. He is based at Charles Sturt University’s Canberra campus, spoke at a recent public event in Melbourne and said Joe Romm was among those he always turned to for trusted climate change information – Robert McLean.)