How do You Solve a Problem Like Climate Change?
Naomi Klein says that capitalism cannot be the solution to the problem of climate change: “If we really believed that climate change is an existential crisis, if we believed climate change is a weapon of mass destruction, as John Kerry said, why on Earth would you leave it to the vagaries of the market?” Klein clarifies that she is not saying that “the market has no role”. While agreeing that there will be “solar and wind millionaires”, she says that a solution to climate change requires major changes that can only be achieved via “a strong role for the public sector, a strong role for regulations and, yes, incentives”. Klein’s approach sounds like a (much) stronger version of the approach Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein described in their book, Nudge . Jeremy Waldron describes the book thus: “Some (choices) make themselves clamorously known; others have to be unearthed…There is no getting away from this: choices are always going to be structured in some manner, wheth