Thanks to Michael Shellenberger of the Breakthrough Institute for pressing into my hands “The Wrong Trousers”, a fascinating 50 page article by British social scientists Gwyn Prins and Steve Rayner that came out a year ago. I missed it at the time, so excuse me for chewing it over on the blog now.
The title, “The Wrong Trousers” is, of course, a reference to the Oscar-winning animated film of that name in which the hapless Wallace (of Wallace and Gromit) is trapped in a pair of automated Techno Trousers which he thought would make his life easier, but in fact take him places where he doesn’t wish to go.
The Kyoto protocol on climate change is a bad case of the wrong trousers according to Prins and Rayner. By now it has a huge institutional momentum and it’s not taking us where we want to go.
You can see the full article here, a summary from Nature here, and make up your own mind about some of the knotty arguments it provoked here and here.
The authors believe that human-induced climate change is indeed real and serious. But they convincingly argue that in ten years of operation Kyoto has not achieved its goals of reducing international climate emissions (most of the countries that signed up to Kyoto have increased their greenhouse gas emissions in that period); that an intergovernmental treaty between 150 countries was the wrong kind of instrument for solving a problem that is primarily driven by a dozen nations; and that the preoccupation with emissions targets prevented much serious thought about the mechanisms by which the targets would be met, (leading to widespread manipulation in which companies have created potent greenhouse gases in order to make money from claiming Kyoto credits for destroying the gases that they made.)
What interests me most is Prins and Rayner’s distinction between “wicked problems” (a technical term in the theory of planning) and “tame” ones. The thing about “wicked problems,” (of which climate change is a prime example,) is that it’s impossible to give them a definitive formulation; “the information needed to understand the problem depends on one’s idea for solving it.” There’s also nowhere to stop in understanding the problem, as it results from endless interacting causal chains, (in this case climate and its interaction with human societies.)
This means that there will be no silver bullet solution. (For example, in the Kyoto case specifying limits to carbon emissions and attempting to set up an artificial carbon market to achieve it.) “Climate change is the result of a particular development path and its globally interlaced supply system of fossil energy. No single intervention can change such a complex nexus.”
Instead, Prins and Rayner argue we need “silver buckshot”, a range of interventions together with a social learning process that can incorporate the dynamic interaction of our understanding of the problem and the ways we are trying to solve it. There needs to be “a portfolio of approaches that would move us in the right direction, even though we cannot predict which specific ones might stimulate the necessary fundamental changes.” They suggest six particular elements.
1. Abandon one size fits all countries universalism.
2. Devise trading schemes from the bottom up; don’t impose them by international fiat.
3. Deal with problems at the lowest possible level of decision making.
4. Invest a lot of money in clean technology R and D.
5. Increase spending on adaptation to the effects of climate change.
6. Understand that successful climate policy does not necessarily focus instrumentally on the climate.
Two things stand from the point of view of the religious ecology movement. Firstly, we take our cues from general environmental policy makers. If the Kyoto process is held to be the correct technical solution to climate change, then we throw the religious moral voice behind Kyoto.
But what if the policy makers get it badly wrong? Then our lobbying goes to prop up a failed policy. We also need to try and evaluate and critique policy from the perspective of our religious values.
The second point is this: if “wicked problems” such as climate change have no single, simple solution then we need to make sure we’re facing in the right general direction, try a range of plausible solutions and be flexible enough to learn by doing. But how do we make sure that our attempted solutions aren’t pointing the wrong way (e.g. the great biofuels fiasco?)
Religious and spiritual traditions have a crucial role to play in facing us in the right direction. With thousands of years of wisdom behind them they can help orient our culture and our thinking in the direction of reverence for life and awareness of its interconnectedness, rather than the opposite.
I'm Julian, Co-Founder of 
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