It's so refreshing to hear someone say with great clarity why the current approach to climate change doesn't work and will never work. He brilliantly demolishes a series of quaint myths that underpin the public understanding of negotiations on climate change - that scientists decide what needs to be done to prevent dangerous warming, diplomats decide how to share out the effort, and then national governments implement, with engineering coming to the rescue with new technologies. All wrong, of course. He takes aim at legally binding targets... good - these have become an article of faith amongst many governments, especially the Europeans: but they are counter-productive in these negotiations. If we could only abandon the fetish for impossible-to-negotiate targets and focus instead on agreeing specific policies and measures that would actually do something without holding countries accountable for something they can't basically control. Victor argues that trade agreements are a better model for addressing climate change than previous environmental agreements like the Montreal Protocol - but above all, he is urging a strategic negotiating switch from trying to specify an outcome, to co-ordinated measures that make a difference - focusing on major programmes like introducing gas for coal substitution in China, a safe simple nuclear reactor and secure fuel cycle, forest protection.
He argues for a co-ordinated international approach to innovation for climate technologies, but also for addressing 'lock-out' in which new technologies can never gain a foothold in energy infrastructure especially and to design innovation systems so that innovators can appropriate gains from their work.
This is not a sceptics' or deniers' book - far from it. He basically accepts the prevailing science consensus, though with the interesting observation that uncertainties have increased as knowledge has deepened (we should worry not take comfort from that), and with the caveat that it isn't the general warming that really troubles him, but the 'fat tails' of the unexpected extreme and currently unlikely scenarios that we should fear. He believe there are strong adaptive responses already built into society but argues for a serious consideration of geo-engineering as a rapid response to the more extreme scenarios.
He is a meticulous writer and has the reader's interests and interest in mind - the book is very well summarised and organised. If every policy-maker just read and took note of the first overview chapter before the next Conference of the Parties, we would be in a much better place - at present the negotiators have sore heads from repeated failures. Victor advises against further banging of heads against the wall and doing something constructive instead.
Disclosure: no links to the author or publisher. It's just a brilliant book.
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