Friday, February 04, 2022



Climate Change: The good news

I do a lot of posts about climate change policy and how bad its going, but over on Interest, Robert McLachlan has a roundup of what went right in 2021. Its an impressive list: solar power, carbon prices, EVs, climate lawsuits and actual transition plans (to which I'd add "the slow death of the offshore gas industry", "closing coal mines", and "more trees"). Some of it (solar, EVs) is obviously stuff that needs to scale up, but we're taking the first steps towards that, and you can see that change is coming. And the more we keep the pressure up, the faster it will arrive.

Which just makes the lack of progress on agriculture all the more glaring. The rest of the economy is pulling its weight, working towards solving this problem. Meanwhile, farmers are still refusing to play a part, offering a laughable scheme for emissions pricing loaded with dodgy accounting and denier bullshit to justify continued special treatment. And the longer they refuse, the more they erode their social license, and the harsher the public reaction is going to be.