Cap and Trade: A Modest Proposal

The world's attempt to wean itself from carbon is not going so well. It probably doesn't help that the biggest emitters (the US and China) aren't playing, but Andrew C. Revkin, writing in The New York Times argues that a concensus is building that our current attempts aren't working. He cites an article by Jeffrey Sachs in Scientific American for a start. Sachs:

Technology policy lies at the core of the climate change challenge. Even with a cutback in wasteful energy spending, our current technologies cannot support both a decline in carbon dioxide emissions and an expanding global economy. If we try to restrain emissions without a fundamentally new set of technologies, we will end up stifling economic growth, including the development prospects for billions of people. The key is new low-carbon technology, not simply energy efficiency.

Economists often talk as though putting a price on carbon emissions—through tradable permits or a carbon tax—will be enough to deliver the needed reductions in those emissions. This is not true. Europe’s carbon-trading system may or may not have modestly reduced emissions, but it has not shown much capacity to generate large-scale research nor to develop, demonstrate and deploy breakthrough technologies. At the margin, a trading system might marginally influence the choices between coal and gas plants or provoke a bit more adoption of solar and wind power, but it will not lead to the necessary fundamental overhaul of energy systems

Sachs answer is to accelerate technological change to come up with carbon free alternatives. Revkin talks of a "Manhattan Project" for the purpose. Frequent denialist sympathiser Roger Pielke Jr seems to be thinking along similar lines.

This mostly seems bogus to me. The Manhattan Project was a crash program to develop a newly discovered technology. Various schemes for reducing carbon emissions don't fit that paradigm. They consist mainly of wishful thinking.

Inspired by Jonathan Swift, I offer a modest proposal that I believe would address the core of the problem while actually providing economic stimulus. Apply the cap and trade principle to human reproduction. Reducing fertility is not only the key to rapid economic growth but also the only approach likely to reduce carbon emissions in the mid to long term.

The principle is simple: women's right to reproduce would be capped. The sufficiently rich could purchase additional reproductive rights from the poor. This would tend to put economic power in poor countries exactly where it has been shown to do the most good - in the hands of poor women, while also ensuring that most children would be born into families with sufficient resources to support them.