A taxonomy of approaches to climate change

I think my favourite thing about PIELC is its diversity. It is huge, in terms of number of attendees and scope. For example, the keynote speakers included:

• a toxics regulator from the California Environmental Protection Agency;
• a lawyer suing large greenhouse gas emitters on behalf of a remote Alaskan village that is being eroded by rising sea levels;
• the lawyer who turned a law school paper into Doe v. Unocal;
• a former diplomat who drew links between the collapse of communism, the current financial crisis, and our need to transition to post-carbon economy;
• and a writer who advocates a rapid transition away from civilization (he also sells t-shirts on his website.)

Encountering this diversity of approaches to environmentalism and environmental law got me thinking about about the different approaches people bring to the issue of climate change, and I've come up with a tentative taxonomy. I don't think anyone who has thought seriously about climate change believes there is just one answer to the problem, but each of us approaches the issue from a particular perspective. Having heard and read what a number of people have had to say about climate change, I have identified (at least) three approaches. There is obvious overlap between the three categories, and I'm not sure this list is exhaustive, but my interest here is in cataloguing and distinguishing the analytic frames people bring to bear on the problem. Here is what I have so far:

1. Climate change as technical problem. The issue of climate change is one of technology: climate change is caused by bad technologies that emit excessive amounts of greenhouse gases, and can be solved by replacing those technologies, or employing other technologies to mitigate the effects of climate change. Solar power, hybrid vehicles, carbon capture and sequestration, and artificial volcanoes are all technical answers to climate change. My sense is that scientists, and especially engineers, are inclined to use this approach.


2. Climate change as economic problem. The way we allocate and value resources has led to climate change, and a shift in the allocation and valuation of resources is what will drive the changes we need to reduce global warming. I think this is the dominant frame of analysis right now, at least in terms of policy responses: approaches like carbon taxes and cap-and-trade are fundamentally economic in character, in that they seek to tie emissions limits to the cost of emitting. I don't think this is that much of a surprise, since, for at least the last twenty or twenty-five years, political and policy analysis has been primarily economic in nature. For what it's worth, this is the approach I am inclined to take.


3. Climate change as lifestyle problem. Our way of life has caused climate change, and our way of life has to change if we are going to solve climate change. My sense is that this approach is especially appealing to old-school movement environmentalists; after all, it fits with their long-term claim that our lifestyle is unsustainable and needs to be changed. And linking climate change to lifestyle has given new life to old environmentalist ideas, like local-sourcing, energy-use reduction, vegetarianism, the de-industrialization of farming, reducing logging, and the list could go on.

What's interesting to me about these different approaches is that sometimes well-intentioned people working towards the same goal can completely talk past one another. For example, at last year's PIELC I went to a talk on global policy responses to climate change, a primarily "type-2" panel. Panelists discussed developments in international cap-and-trade schemes, and transition possibilities for domestic industries. At the end, a woman got up to ask a question. She had clearly been involved in the environmental movement for a long time (quite possibly longer than I'd been alive), and had clearly not heard what she had come to hear. She spoke quite passionately about how living organisms in soil sequester carbon, and how the chemicals used in non-organic farming kill those organisms, and how we could end climate change today if we would just stop poisoning the soil, and how she couldn't understand why the panelists weren't talking about that. In essence, she was advocating at "type-3" solution. The panelists were at a loss; even though they were talking about the same issue, they were approaching it in such different terms that it was hard for any meaningful dialogue to happen.

I guess my point is that all these approaches are valuable and indeed necessary for dealing with climate change, and that we need to be aware of our own inclinations and predispositions as we work towards dealing with perhaps the most dangerous threat facing the planet today.

What do you think? Did I miss any approaches? And what approach do you think you are most inclined to use?