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The barriers are all human

International conferences on climate change have concentrated on emission reduction targets. However, how to achieve those promised emissions reductions has never expained.

There are plenty of future promises – but no actual plans.

  • Defined targets are insufficient
  • Roadmaps are inexistent

Most countries are failing to achieve even the modest reductions agreed upon under  climate treaties.  So far, none of the tried approaches has made a meaningful difference.

The key barriers to a renewable energy transition (and a climate tax) are:

  • Insufficient familiarity with the scientific consensus due to under-coverage in politics, conventional media, and social media
  • Insufficient public awareness of the state of global warming
  • Lack of political courage, will, and believe
  • Lack of global agreement
  • The influence of large players with endless financial resources to lobby politics: the owners and executives of the fossil industry, and the authorian heads of petrostate countries
  • The unwillingness of the financial markets to stop investing in, and seeking rent of, investment in the fossil realm
  • The illogical “cultural war” around climate change and renewable energy – physics is physics, end economics is economics. The energy transition is in its nature a completly a-political issue.
  • The lack of a reallistic, working approach and roadmap to actually achieve emission reductions in practice and across all sectors, with minimal prohibitions and without negative impact on the economy

A Climate Tax provides a financial plan. It is financing the transition made easy. But political and power barriers remain.

Can utopia become real?

Implementing a global climate tax would require the governments of this world to actually come together, to agree on, and implement something,
That alone is politically illusionary.

A global climate tax is the most illusionary concept – except for all the others.

So – how could that possibly be achieved?

Politics seems not able or not courageous enough, or too much in disagreement, or too much exposed to particular interest, to act without external pressure. Changes must come from somewhere else. Society is composed of three main spheres:Individuals, companies (and other institutions that employee people), and the state.
If a significant number of players from both the individual and the company sphere would agree, and engage for a specific plan (like, for example, a climate tax), then the states would have to follow suite. And because it needs to happen fast, the number of the ones engaged – actively, or passively supportive – must be high.

So let’s be realistic, and ask for the impossible.

Because for humanity to survive, we need to make the illusionary happen.

  • Idyllically, there would be people signing a petition (the passive supportive) in every country of this World, demanding the same plan. Maybe 10% of humanity? That would be 800 million human beings. Better 25%? That would be 2 billion human beings…
  • Maybe 3% of humanity actively engaging through lobbying politicians and businesses, calling, awareness raising, marching, social media campaigning, civil disobedience. That would be roughly 250 million people…
  • Business coalitions, globally and nationally, throwing their weight behind, using their economic leverage and access to government agencies to call and push for the same plan as the individual.

If we have that – then maybe we can push governments to actually act.