Bottom-up Approaches
My idea at the beginning of my thesis of a bottom-up approach to tackling climate change is bolstered by an article (The New Dynamics of Climate Change) on ClimateBiz which talks about the 11th Annual International Summit on Global Warming under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The meeting was held in Montreal in early December (I’m just getting through a bunch of old email now).
The gist of the article is how local city and state governments are making real strides in reforming industry and business, while the federal government continues to drag its feet. The work of these local agencies has produced meaningful results and interesting revelations:
In the 1990s, experts estimated the cost of reducing GHGs to exceed $50 per metric ton of carbon dioxide, constituting intolerable burdens to the gross domestic product of developed and developing nations. But actual project-based reductions secured by The Climate Trust—most of which come from U.S. projects—now cost less than $10 per metric ton of carbon dioxide. This is far below the cost of supporting non-commercial technologies which may or may not achieve real reductions in the future.
I’m happy to read these kinds of articles because they show that local changes can have larger-scale impacts and that these local efforts are in fact effective and ground-breaking.