*Longtime lurker, and I've managed to fight akrasia and geniune shortage of time to put my thoughts down into a post. I think it does deserve a post, but I don't have the karma or the confidence to create a top-level post.

Comments and feedback really welcome and desired : I've gotten tired of being intellectually essentially alone.*

There are many urgent problems in the world yet Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) should be considered the defining crisis to humanity. For example, increasing drug-resistance in pathogens , reducing populations of endangered species, an increase in fundamentalism, rapid increase in lifestyle diseases, increasing inequality, etc.

The key difference is that solutions to the other problems can be either technological or economic. Even solutions to fundamentalism usually involve development and infrastructure deployment, which is a difficult, but known, process. Reducing populations of endangered species looks more insoluble, but it’s rarely land itself that’s in shortage. Better monitoring and surveillance can greatly reduce poaching.

AGW however requires, in addition to technological and economic solutions, solutions at the social, psychological, and, fundamentally, human level. Now this sounds true only in a wishy-washy way, so I’m going to back them up one by one.

AGW of course requires technological solutions. The main emitters of GHGs are electricity generation, industry and transport sector. All of these are using fossil-fuel for the energy, so we need low-carbon sources of energy. We also waste a lot of energy in various ways, and it’s a lot cheaper to not consume that unit of energy than to generate a green unit of energy, so energy efficiency is needed.

Low-carbon energy sources are relatively mature with well-known costs. Aside from certain rare metal shortages, a worldwide rollout of low-carbon energy sources is eminently possible.

Energy efficient generation, transmission and consumption devices can allow us to reduce energy consumed by half, at max. There are hard limits to the effectiveness of energy efficiency, so new low-carbon energy deployment is quite necessary.

Basically, there are technological solutions, which require gigantic capital outlay, thus passing it on to the economic sector. AGW of course also requires economic solutions, primarily for the massive capital outlay. Since low-carbon energy is more expensive than fossil-fuel energy, end-consumers will have to pay the costs in some form or the other. This would have to be accounted for by economic growth.

More insidious, however, is the requirement for continuous expansion of economy for it to remain stable. Also, economic growth and energy consumption growth are tightly linked – more energy made available creates economic value, and more affluent consumers demand more energy-intensive goods and services.

So then, we would need a way to have economic growth, without carbon-intensive energy growth – a process called decoupling. One fundamental problem with a substitution of fossil-fuel by low-carbon energy sources is the sheer scale of the operation. Indeed, “even if solar panels are as cheap as dinner plates and 100% efficient, it would still take a few decades to replace current energy sources with solar”[citation needed]. So clearly, we need to reduce energy consumption in the meantime.

Relative decoupling means the emissions intensity of the economy decreases – higher economic value generated per joule of energy consumed. This kind of decoupling means nothing for AGW if economic growth continues. Absolute decoupling means decreasing absolute energy consumed and increasing economic value. So far, this stage is proving elusive.

Unfortunately, economic growth is the only reason countries around the world can have stable societies. The moment economic growth stops, basically chaos breaks out.

This is essentially an allocation problem. We have all the technology and resources to ensure basic necessities to everyone, but

1. We have already allocated resources in a highly imbalanced manner
2. We don’t know how to deliver resources to only the resource-poor

Compound this with the fact when more resources enter the economy, those already with resources tend to accumulate more of it. Notice, however, that I made no moral position on inequality, except that today we do not want poor people to die out of lack of resources, and the cost of basic resources keeps rising (again due to economic growth).

The problem should be clear by now: we require an increasing amount of resources to simply keep the economy running.

Rectifying this requires us to get mentally used to the fact that things don't just keep getting better every year. And that's neither a technological problem, nor an economic one. It's psychological.