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| Kathleen Rogers |
By Kathleen Rogers and Jigar Shah
Disasters from climate change are becoming more frequent and more severe
- consider this year alone, with the devastating flooding in Pakistan, the Russian heat wave, an incredible ice chunk calving off of Greenland
- and New York's hottest summer on record.
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| Jigar Shah |
Governments are becoming exhausted dealing with these impacts and realizing that adapting to a changing climate will be difficult and expensive. There is no scientific debate that every major ecosystem in the world is declining. But we are not winning the policy debate, as we somehow have to convince people that these impacts affect them personally. It's now or never to win the climate war and we need a new approach.
We need to shift the debate away from a singular focus on carbon dioxide and back to something that affects us all personally. Issues like the rapid depletion of our natural assets, access to energy for the poor, increased jobs and economic development. We all want more comfortable homes, lower fuel bills, local jobs, fewer polluting coal plants, less reliance on foreign oil, cleaner air and a world to pass on to the next generation. These values will help us win the debate.
As the failure of the Copenhagen climate conference proved, policy is necessary but not sufficient. A new, complementary and different skill set is needed in addition to traditional methods - an investment in the tools to move capital not just lobby for votes.
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